What a Duke Professor's LEGO Experiment Can Teach Us About Content Distribution
By John Azoni, founder of Unveild— a video production company for higher education.
TL;DR:
Your content team's motivation problem is almost always a distribution problem. Research from Duke shows people do 60% more work when they can see their efforts accumulating — and quit faster when they can't. Every piece of content that gets made and never properly distributed is a slow leak in your team's creative drive. The fix is simpler than you'd think: make distribution an explicit KPI, assign ownership, and block 30 minutes every morning just to get existing content in front of more people.
Your writers, videographers, and designers might be losing steam.
Here’s why: a video gets made, a blog post gets written, a campaign gets built — and then it either sits in a folder somewhere or gets published once and never touched again. Few people end up seeing it, and even less people, if any, are making decisions to attend your school based on it. And slowly, your team stops caring as much about making the next thing.
There's actual research behind why this happens. And more importantly, there's a pretty simple fix.
The LEGO Experiment That Explains Your Content Problem
Dan Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. In a study on motivation, he had students assemble LEGO Bionicle figurines for small amounts of money — starting at $3 and decreasing with each one they built.
Here's where it gets interesting. For half the students, each completed figurine was set aside, intact, where they could see it accumulating. For the other half, the researcher would disassemble the previous figurine right in front of them as they were building the next one.
The results were stark. Students who watched their work get torn apart quit after building an average of 7 figurines. Students who could see their finished work piling up kept going — averaging 11 figurines. Nearly 60% more output. And the last one cost them nothing. They built it for free.
The task was the same, and so was the pay structure. The only difference was whether the work felt like it was adding up to something.
The Sisyphus Problem in Higher Ed Marketing
This is what behavioral economists call the "Sisyphus scenario" — named after the guy in Greek mythology who pushes a boulder to the top of a hill only to watch it roll back down, forever.
When people can't see their work accumulating, motivation erodes. And in higher ed marketing, this plays out constantly.
A content team spends weeks producing a well-researched article, a compelling student story, or a thoughtful video series. It gets published… sorta. Maybe it gets one social post. Or maybe it goes on Youtube as an unlisted link, intending for it to get embedded into email nurture sequences… but people got busy and forgot about it. Before you know it it’s been a over a year since it was produced and nobody knows it exists.
This matters for two reasons. The obvious one is budget waste — you paid to create that content and almost no one saw it.
The less obvious one is cultural damage. Under-distributing content is a slow leak in your team's creative motivation, and every piece that goes nowhere sends a signal, whether you intend it or not, that the work doesn't really matter.
What "Under-Distribution" Actually Looks Like
Under-distribution doesn't always mean a piece never gets published. More often it looks like a video that gets uploaded to YouTube but never shared natively on LinkedIn where your prospective graduate students actually are. Or it never makes it onto the program landing page to replace that student story that’s 13 years old now.
Or a blog post that lives on the website but never gets surfaced to admissions counselors who could be using it in 1-to-1 conversations with admits. Instead it gets posted to the university’s brand page on Linkedin (that the algorithm will bury because it prioritizes content from personal profiles over brand pages). And that’s if you’re lucky. Realistically, the person that wrote the article posts it to their profile with a “go check out this great story” post linking to your website. I’m gonna hold your hand when I say this: nobody’s going to check it out. You posted it in a way that the algorithm doesn’t like, nor does your audience like.
How to Fix It: Make Distribution a KPI
This is one of the more fixable problems in higher ed marketing because the content already exists — you don't have to create anything new, you just need a system.
Make distribution someone's explicit responsibility. It should show up in a job description and in performance reviews, and someone on your team should be able to answer the question: "Of everything we created this year, how much of it got properly distributed?" If no one owns it, it won't happen.
Build a daily distribution habit. One of the highest-ROI things your team can do is block 30 minutes at the start of every day specifically for distribution — not creation, not strategy, just taking something that already exists and getting it in front of more people. Upload that video natively to LinkedIn, turn that blog post into a carousel, send that student story to your admissions counselors so they can use it in yield conversations.
Connect your marketing and admissions teams. A simple shared Google Doc organized by common student questions or objections — with links to relevant videos, articles, and stories — can dramatically increase how much your content actually gets used. Most admissions counselors want to share great content with prospects. They just can't find it when they need it.
The Takeaway
Content distribution isn't optional. It’s the very thing that makes the next thing worth creating. If you want your team to keep building great work, they need to see it accumulating somewhere, to know that it's reaching people and doing something useful in the world.
If your team is currently winging distribution or has no plan at all, that's a solvable problem. Reach out — we run a workshop specifically for this.
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