Midya U AdvisoryMarketing & AI Strategy for Higher Education
15+ years inside Canadian higher ed marketing, public and private — building teams and running eight-figure budgets through every regulatory curveball. Practitioner-led, AI-accelerated.
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The state of affairs
Canadian higher education is in the worst stretch it's faced in a generation.
When the IRCC caps cut international enrolment, the tuition propping up budgets went with it — thousands of layoffs and hundreds of suspended programs. Two decades of "stable, welcoming Canada" took real damage in two years: rules that change every few months, and applicants who no longer know what next year holds. Domestic enrolment can't cover revenue that size.
AI landed in the middle of it, from two directions. Inside, teams run a dozen tools nobody formally approved while IT, Privacy, Procurement, Legal, and Senate argue over a policy that still doesn't exist. Meanwhile prospective students are asking ChatGPT and Gemini what your institution is like, and nobody on staff has seen the answers. Add the budget crunch, and a campus ends up paying six figures a year for AI it can't measure.
And most marketing operations are running on systems built for a world that's gone:
- Campaign playbooks built for a bigger funnel
- Over-indexed on a handful of source markets
- A brand written before the IRCC cap hit
- A pile of AI tools with no clear ROI that half the team has never opened
- No institutional AI policy
- A team that hasn't had time to think upstream in months
Most of it made sense five years ago.
Services
Start here — fixed-scope engagements
AI Search Readiness Audit
Prospective students ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini about your institution before they ever reach your website. Cheap tools will show you what the engines say about you today. The audit starts where those tools stop: why the engines answer the way they do, which sources they're pulling from, and a 12-month plan your team can run without subscribing to anything.
Marketing Function Audit & Reset
An honest read on your marketing function — what's working and what's held together with string. The new reality is a smaller budget, a smaller team, and pressure to show ROI yesterday. I review the whole operation and rebuild it to fit the budget and team you have now.
Brand Repositioning
Your brand was probably written for a market that no longer exists — pre-cap, pre-cohort-decline, pre-AI-search. I name the gap between how you describe yourself and how applicants decide, then reposition you for the market that's in front of you.
Enrolment (SEM) Lifecycle Audit
Strategic Enrolment Management. If your SEM plan was written before the IRCC cap landed, it's probably pointing you down the wrong road. I map awareness through deposit, find where the funnel is leaking, and tell you what to fix before next intake hits.
AI Operations & Policy Blueprint
Your board has started asking what the institution is doing about AI, and Ottawa just launched a national AI strategy to make sure the question doesn't go away. This blueprint maps where AI is pulling its weight inside your operations, where it's a liability in waiting, and the governance your institution needs before IT, Privacy, Procurement, Legal, and Senate will sign off on deploying anything. One policy faculty, students, legal, and marketing can all read the same way.
Durations are typical for a mid-size institution — larger or multi-campus institutions may run longer.
Bigger mandates
Function Build (6–12 months)
For education groups launching a new institution — or restructuring an existing one. I build the marketing function from zero: hire, train, hand it off, exit.
Executive Seats
Board-level strategy. Briefings for senior leadership teams. Keynotes for rooms that need someone who's done the work.
Custom Packages
Something specific in mind? Tell me what you're up against and I'll scope it.
Why work with Midya U Advisory?
Practitioner first.
VP of Marketing & Communications who built marcom teams and operations from scratch, public sector and private. I've done the job your marketing leaders are doing now, so the advice starts from how the work gets done.
AI accountability over AI adoption.
"Should we use AI" stopped being the question a while ago. What matters now is which tools, on which decisions, are earning their keep — and which ones cost more than they return. I help you tell them apart, then act on it.
Sector-fluent on day one.
IRCC caps, PALs, provincial compliance. Board dynamics. Union politics. Faculty governance. I already know how it works, so you're not paying me to learn your sector on the clock.
A plan you can run this week.
You get something your team can use the week it lands: a roadmap, an action plan, a policy draft, a hiring plan.
Independent.
No software, no subscriptions, no reseller commissions, no tool I get a cut of. You're paying for the read and the plan.
In the tools every day.
I use the major AI tools daily and track what's new, what's better, and what broke. When I tell you which ones are worth deploying, that comes from daily use rather than a vendor demo.
Expertise
15+ years in the work, hands-on. Every audit, roadmap, and recommendation comes from having done the job myself.
About
I spent 15+ years inside Canadian higher education marketing, public and private — building teams from scratch, running $17M+ annual budgets, and leading campaigns across domestic and international markets. Most recently as VP of Marketing & Communications at University Canada West.
Midya U Advisory is what comes next. After years inside higher ed watching the AI inflection land, I'm spending this chapter on the outside — helping marketing and communications leaders make hard calls in the toughest stretch our industry has seen. The work is anchored in higher education and reaches into other sectors facing their own version of the same shift.
Insights
Field notes on higher ed marketing, brand, enrolment, and AI — from inside the work.
Where Your Search Traffic Went
Google Search sent publishers 34% fewer pageviews in 2025, and AI referrals are still under 1% of traffic. Here's where your program pages' clicks went.
How to Tell If Your Brand Predates Your Market
Four checks to run before any redesign: when the positioning was written, whether it matches who you enrol now, and whether a rival could sign it too.
Five AI Tools Your Marketing Team Pays For — and What "Earning Its Keep" Actually Looks Like
Most teams pay for five or six AI subscriptions and can't say what any of them did last month. A renewal-season test for each one.
FAQ
What does a fixed-scope audit involve?
A defined scope, a set timeline, and a named deliverable — agreed before we start. I review your documents, data, and systems, interview the people who run the work, and hand you a written readout: what's working, what isn't, and what to do about it, in order. Most audits run a few weeks from kickoff to readout.
Who do you work with?
Universities and colleges, both public and private, along with education groups and organizations in other sectors working through the same shift. Client work stays confidential — I don't publish client names or case studies without permission.
Will you work within our governance — IT, Privacy, Procurement, Legal, Senate?
Yes. That's the job. Public institutions run on rules, and recommendations that ignore them don't survive first contact. Everything I hand you is designed to pass review by the offices that have to sign off on it.
Do you sell or resell any software?
No. No software, no subscriptions, no reseller commissions, no tools I get a cut of. When I recommend a tool, it's because it earns its place.
What does it cost?
Every engagement is fixed-scope, so pricing is set to the scope and agreed before we start — no hourly meters, no open-ended retainers. We go through pricing together on the discovery call.
How does an engagement start?
A thirty-minute discovery call. You tell me what you're trying to achieve; I tell you honestly whether I'm the right person to help. If it's a fit, you get a fixed-scope proposal within days.
Start a conversation
Discovery calls are thirty minutes. No deck. No pitch. I want to know two things:
— What are you trying to achieve?
— Am I the right person to help you get there?
Book a discovery call →