#116 - UGC Video for Higher Ed: The Massive Potential and Untapped Opportunities
With John Azoni
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SHOW NOTES
In this solo episode, John pulls back the curtain on Unveild's new "Directed UGC" offering — and the surprising gap in the market he hit while trying to promote it. When he went looking for colleges using UGC video well, he found plenty of day-in-the-life content and campus vibes clips, but almost nothing using UGC to tell a real story or market a specific program. That gap became the episode.
John walks through how he landed on a working definition of "real" UGC, why day-in-the-life became the default format schools reach for, and what it looks like when a student or alum is given real direction instead of just a phone and a prompt — using a story from a University of Montana journalism alum as the throughline.
Key takeaways:
Most schools treat UGC and "real" video content as two separate lanes — polished storytelling goes to the video team, and UGC defaults to day-in-the-life. That split is leaving a lot of good content on the table.
John's working definition: real UGC is a student or alum bringing you into their world — how they think, what matters to them, what they've lived through — not just a clip of something happening.
Day-in-the-life dominates because it's easy to operationalize — hand someone a phone, no storytelling skill required. Anything beyond that needs direction and coaching, which is harder to systematize.
Program tours, project walkthroughs, and "a day in my job" videos from alumni are underused UGC formats that could carry the same weight as scripted student-story videos — with more authenticity.
The best moments are often unscripted — John's example: a Montana alum's unplanned detour into how the journalism program's "learn by doing" philosophy played out, including students landing the first photo of Ted Kaczynski during the Unabomber arrest.
Unveild's "Directed UGC" offering pairs a professional storyteller-led interview and shot list with in-house editing, aiming to solve the two biggest UGC pain points: finding willing students and getting usable footage back.
Schools/programs mentioned as reference points for UGC-style content:
The Fletcher School at Tufts University
Kogod School of Business (American University)
University of Michigan
Westminster University
Sewanee: The University of the South
University of Birmingham
University of Leeds
Connect with John:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
Email: john@unveild.tv
Website: https://unveild.tv
Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter
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(Done with AI so only about 95% accurate)
00;00;00;09 - 00;00;25;03
John Azoni
I want to do something a little unusual today. Normally on this show, I'm talking about how you market your school. But today I want to flip that around and talk about something I've been building over the last six months and take you behind the scenes of some of the thought process. And one particular wall that I hit as I was planning how to roll it out because it revealed to me a lot about some of the opportunities that Higher Ed is missing, I think, to market their programs.
00;00;25;14 - 00;00;45;04
John Azoni
All right. So let me just set the stage here and then I want to go back in time to what I noticed in the UGC landscape that I think is a big gap. So last week we launched a new offering around UGC video. It's a whole system for helping schools get real student generated video content, but the whole process is guided by professional storytellers.
00;00;45;04 - 00;01;11;00
John Azoni
Typical UGC efforts involved trying to find students to participate, which is hard in itself and then, you know, wrangling them and then trying to set some sort of creative standards and then letting them loose and then being disappointed by the quality that you get back. That is often the case. Our approach, we call it directed UGC. It's everything you love about UGC video, but guided by professional storytellers who are collaborating with the content creators.
00;01;11;00 - 00;01;30;29
John Azoni
So we film a remote interview, then we give them a shot list to complete with instructions on how to achieve that in a quality manner. And then the footage is edited by the same editors that work on our cinematic work. So that's the context for the rest of this episode. We did two pilots, one with University of Montana and one with Boston University.
00;01;31;00 - 00;01;52;10
John Azoni
We proved the system. It worked like we wanted to. Now the question was, how do we roll this out? And this is where I hit a wall that ended up teaching me a lot about the gaps in how schools are utilizing UGC and how I can position this offering a little bit better. My first instinct in how to roll this out and promote it was kind of an easier move.
00;01;52;24 - 00;02;18;11
John Azoni
One of my content pillars is inspirational stuff, so I'll post some out of the box video to LinkedIn that I came across from a particular college, and those posts usually get traction and start a conversation in the comments section. So my first idea was promoting this through a content series showcasing schools that are doing UGC really well. And you know, we do a series of LinkedIn posts, we'll do a podcast episode.
00;02;18;11 - 00;02;44;29
John Azoni
We remixed that into a blog post, we take that blog post and turn it into a LinkedIn article, and we'd use that content in our newsletter, kind of just like go on a road show of, you know, look who's doing UGC well, do a webinar, all that stuff. And then it can be like, Hey, if you like how they're doing it and you want to have it done for you without having to build the whole system yourself, you know how that's your boy?
00;02;45;10 - 00;03;13;05
John Azoni
Brilliant. Except when I actually went looking, I couldn't find much. Almost everything I came across was some version of the same thing, day in the life content or like, campus vibes, like Quick Campus vibes. Like, here's a fun spot on campus. And the majority of schools maybe had some scattered UGC content, but nobody had really systematized it. And almost nobody was using UGC to actually market a specific program or tell a story with any sort of shape to it.
00;03;13;16 - 00;03;33;22
John Azoni
Now I looked pretty hard. I'm a one person shop. I mean, it's me and a bunch of, you know, a core team of freelancers that I've worked with for years. But still, at the end of the day, it's just me. So it's not like I have time to research every college under the sun. I'm sure there are colleges out there that are doing this in a robust way, but I wasn't able to easily find them.
00;03;33;29 - 00;03;50;20
John Azoni
If you know of one, send me some inspo to John at unveiled dot TV. But I was digging and digging and not coming up with much that I felt warranted. A whole content campaign. I could have made a whole run of content about day in the life videos, but that would get boring because they mostly all look pretty similar.
00;03;50;25 - 00;04;08;12
John Azoni
I even started making some of these some short form videos with some of the UGC videos I found with me, like green screen over top of it, you know, talking like you can see I like Tik tok and reels, but I made two of them and it was starting to feel like, okay, here's the school doing UGC. Well, first up, here's a day in the life.
00;04;08;12 - 00;04;28;06
John Azoni
Next up, here's another day in the life. Next up, here's another day in life. All right. Thanks for watching. So this wasn't that interesting. I did two of them and I was like, this isn't even that interesting. You know, this is not worth like, just this noise. This is just noise on the Internet. You know, for me to really do a whole, you know, big push for, you know, this kind of stuff.
00;04;28;06 - 00;04;55;15
John Azoni
So if you want to see one of those, check out our YouTube shorts on our YouTube channel, Higher Ed storytelling. You'll see me talking about the Fletcher School at Tufts University. They had a few good ones, really great example of school that's doing Day in the Life UGC videos. Really well. So shout out to Fletcher School. They did make the early cut, some others on my list, Hoggard School of Business shout out to Katia Popova, who was on the higher ed storytelling University podcast recently.
00;04;55;15 - 00;05;21;00
John Azoni
They're doing fabulous marketing work over there, so no surprises there that they popped up as doing great UGC. University of Michigan had a few Westminster University, had a long form UGC style video that I really like. Our friends at Suhani shout out to Bobby Silk, who was on the show recently as well. I knew they were doing some UGC work because when he was on the show he mentioned that and so I went looking for it and was able to find it.
00;05;21;00 - 00;05;44;11
John Azoni
And you know, some good day in the life type content and that kind of stuff there. And then, you know, across the pond, University of Birmingham and University of Leeds also doing some good stuff, most of which is day in the life content, which is great and super useful for marketing purposes in a variety of ways. But as I was researching, I quickly noticed this real gray area that had me thinking like, okay, what even is UGC?
00;05;44;20 - 00;06;09;08
John Azoni
Is everything shot on an iPhone, UGC is everything shot by a student? UGC So like, where am I drawing the line in the sand here in this research that I'm trying to do? Because there's a difference between just like normal social media and UGC. I just couldn't put my finger on it because if like a social team posts a video of themselves doing something goofy on campus, is that UGC?
00;06;09;08 - 00;06;27;16
John Azoni
You know, technically it's user generated in the sense that it's a student that made it. Maybe that student works for the social media team or is a brand ambassador or something like that. But it's not what most of us would actually mean when we say UGC. So I do sit down and actually define this for myself. And so here's where I landed.
00;06;28;00 - 00;06;51;23
John Azoni
Real UGC, the kind worth building a program around is a student or alum taking you into their world, not just showing you a clip of something happening, but letting you into how they think about things, what places matter to them and why, what they're working on, what they've been through, you know, taking you along with them, showing you things in their life, showing you things in the program that they're in.
00;06;52;03 - 00;07;17;13
John Azoni
And that naturally lends itself to day in the life videos. A lot of that type of stuff does, but it doesn't have to be pigeonholed into that. It can be someone talking straight into their phone about a cool experience they had or a cool project they're working on or about something they learned that blew their mind in their, you know, nursing class or something like that, or tips for coming to the U.S. as an international student with, you know, some clips woven in from those experiences.
00;07;17;23 - 00;07;42;22
John Azoni
That's not necessarily day in the life, but it's absolutely someone letting you into their world and telling you their story in a way that is really powerful for marketing content, for the marketing and enrollment team, to really inspire people with that and inspire prospects and help move them along the funnel. And so once you define it that way, a whole category of storytelling opens up and that so many schools just aren't touching.
00;07;42;22 - 00;08;05;26
John Azoni
And here's where we get into the point I'm trying to make in this episode. The way that colleges make regular videos like to promote programs, to tell student stories, to increase brand awareness. Almost none of it is being translated over to a UGC like kind of low fi format where it could be really powerful. It's like when schools want to do that kind of video marketing.
00;08;05;26 - 00;08;28;10
John Azoni
They bring in the video people, and then when they want to use UGC, they'll do Day in the Life. But what a huge missed opportunity to take what is already content that students want to see, like student stories, for example, social proof stuff and lean into a UGC format for that really added authenticity. And to be clear, prospective students really want to see day in the life.
00;08;28;10 - 00;08;50;18
John Azoni
So let's keep that. It's a great format, super smart, do lots of them. I love those videos. I love them from a marketing perspective. I love them for, you know, my girls are going to go to college. I hope there's lots of, you know, videos like that that help them see themselves there and kind of relieve anxiety because like for me, when I'm going to go do something new, I don't want to look stupid, you know?
00;08;50;18 - 00;09;04;06
John Azoni
So I want to see like I want to see someone go through the process, you know? And so, for example, let me give you an example. I'm going deer hunting this year, and I've been before. It's been a while. It's been about a decade since I've been with my father in law. But I have to go sit in my rifle.
00;09;04;15 - 00;09;18;29
John Azoni
It's tough to go to the gun range and do this, and it's been a long time since I've been there. So I'm like, I wonder if there is I haven't looked yet, but I wonder if there is a video of someone like going in and siting their rifle, like going in, paying for the cashier. Do they bring their own ammo?
00;09;18;29 - 00;09;34;01
John Azoni
I forget how I did this before. And then you know the going up and then like, what's the protocol? Like What? You don't want to be the dumb guy with a rifle like that's doing something like that's just not how things are done. They're like, I don't know, do I just, like, walk up and pick a booth or do they assign me one?
00;09;34;03 - 00;09;51;23
John Azoni
Like, all these little questions that I have? I'm like, I would love for someone to just do like a Hey, follow me as I sit in my rifle and then just walk me through this whole process. So all of those things are that's why I like Dane life. It's great and let's keep it. Let's keep doing those. Let's do more of them.
00;09;51;23 - 00;10;20;23
John Azoni
I hope that, you know, with our UGC offering that we get to translate a lot of that into day in the life content. But when you think about what you know, you're hiring an outsourced video company to come in and do you know, it's different stuff. Typically not hiring someone to come in and do day in the life you're hiring them to do like program overviews and, you know, student stories and like, you know, campus tours and things like that or your assigning that to your internal video team and, you know, occupying their bandwidth with that.
00;10;20;23 - 00;10;41;14
John Azoni
So obviously there's value there to the marketing team, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. So why aren't we taking that stuff that we're saying is valuable and using this format that is just really authentic, like just built in authenticity that students, prospective students trust? They want to see everyone's like, yes, UGC, love it, want to do more of it, so why aren't we doing that?
00;10;41;29 - 00;11;02;20
John Azoni
So why isn't that translating in addition to day in the life videos I mentioned, one of our pilots was with University of Montana and we worked with this awesome alum Skyler Shout out to Skyler Crispin's, who was a journalism major and undergrad. She works on campus now and as part of the shot list that we gave her, she gave us a tour of the journalism building.
00;11;02;29 - 00;11;21;04
John Azoni
Nothing fancy, just her like walking and talking. I honestly didn't give her much direction. I think it was like one sentence that's just like, Hey, take us around the journalism building. Like, show us what's cool. And she took that and ran with it. And I just I got so excited seeing her footage because, you know, it's just because she was an alum, it became something else entirely.
00;11;21;04 - 00;11;38;25
John Azoni
She was really looking back on her time here and the value that she got from it. And she showed us classroom. She walked us into a classroom and told us unprompted, like, this is where she met her long term boyfriend, where they were both sitting when they first locked eyes with each other and what they said to each other.
00;11;38;25 - 00;11;55;12
John Azoni
And we didn't use any of that in the final videos because it wasn't relevant for marketing purposes. But I just thought that was great. That was a great little anecdote. You could use that for something. I'm sure maybe the internal team will repurpose it somehow. But then she took us into the newsroom and explained in her own words because they have that came in.
00;11;55;13 - 00;12;14;25
John Azoni
It's like the University of Montana is like real functioning newsroom where journalism students get to go learn by doing, like real journalism. And so she explained all of that, this whole learn by doing philosophy and how that actually plays out day to day with like what kind of stories students get to chase when they're in the journalism school.
00;12;15;04 - 00;12;43;23
John Azoni
Like one was crazy was how University of Montana journalists, students from the came in were the first to get a picture of Ted Kozinski during the whole Unabomber thing, and they had the newspaper article framed on the wall of, you know, this whole wall of like really great stories their students have told. But they have this picture. You know, this article was a picture of him walking out of his cabin in handcuffs because Missoula is only like a couple of hours away from, I guess, where he was hiding out.
00;12;43;23 - 00;13;15;19
John Azoni
And this group of journalism students were able to just hop over there, beat all the news crews there and get a picture of him. I mean, that's crazy. Like like they beat out like these students, probably some like freshmen or in there that like beat the news crews to get this picture. The thing that everyone was trying to do, I'm sure people all over the world, news crews all over the world, were trying to get a picture of Ted Kaczynski and to be the first and who gets it, journalism students from the University of Montana.
00;13;15;19 - 00;13;37;19
John Azoni
I think that's such a great, like proof point, you know, and we wouldn't have gotten that if it was a day in the life. Well, I mean, she's an alum. If it was a day in the life of a student, we would have missed that. You know, they would have shown us in their dorm in getting breakfast and then going to class and typing on a computer and taking notes and then going get coffee with friends and things, all great things.
00;13;38;03 - 00;13;57;28
John Azoni
But we wouldn't have passed through such a monumental story unless we had switched up the format and, you know, had asked to, hey, go show us cool things in the journalism building. So, yeah, none of that was scripted. It just came out of letting her walk and talk. And what you end up with isn't just, here's this cool building.
00;13;57;28 - 00;14;21;16
John Azoni
It's a genuine sense of what for years in that specific program feels like told by someone who lived it. So that's just one example. But like, why aren't we doing that? A student going, Hey, let me give you a quick tour of the engineering program facilities. And here's this thing. I made this autonomous robot, you know, in class, and these are the foundational skills I had to learn in order to complete it.
00;14;21;16 - 00;14;37;11
John Azoni
And here's the problems I ran up against and how I figured out how to fix it. And like, here's the tools I got to learn how to use. Like, that would be cool. Just point your phone at cool stuff like that and just help out a cool project. Have a student tell us about a cool project or an alum taking you into their job on a normal Tuesday.
00;14;37;25 - 00;14;55;10
John Azoni
This is great. I mean, this is a great use for UGC because historically, like when we've tried to do alumni stories, it's very hard to get into their place of work. We were able to do it with University of Chicago Data Science Institute recently with Farmers Fridge. They had an alum data science alum that works for farmers Fridge.
00;14;55;11 - 00;15;20;12
John Azoni
It's like they stocked these like vending machines with really healthy food. That was one of the first times I've ever had success getting into a no one's place of work because they usually just won't let filming in there. We had another student for Data Science Institute work for Google and we're like, okay, great. Like we get to go inside Google and, you know, get this like big name brand stuff and see this environment, the Chicago Google headquarters, whatever.
00;15;20;12 - 00;15;34;23
John Azoni
And then like last minute, the leadership was like, No, you can't come in. You have to stay in the lobby. So we had to like fake like he worked like we had to fake like an office scene with like a Google sign in the background in the lobby. It ended up being great, but it just wasn't the same.
00;15;35;02 - 00;15;51;14
John Azoni
But with someone that just works there and it's just going to document on their phone and just like, Hey, here I am working at my desk, here I am going to the cafeteria, here's the food I'm getting, here's all the options, here's, you know, just whatever they do all day and they, you know, seeing cool stuff that they get to work on, here's projects I'm working on.
00;15;51;26 - 00;16;07;20
John Azoni
Here's the problem we're up against. Here's what we're trying to solve, here's how we're thinking about it. And this is what I do all day. And here's how the university prepared me for this. There are so many options for how a student or an alum can take you into their worlds on their terms. Unfortunately, I just wasn't seeing a lot of that.
00;16;07;20 - 00;16;32;19
John Azoni
So I'll have to say I abandoned the effort of trying to find schools doing this well. But if the potential is that good, why isn't everyone doing it? Two reasons, as best I can tell. First, we're conditioned to think that UGC just is day in the life content. That's the default mental model. So that's what gets made. Second, and this is the real reason I think day in life is just easier to operational eyes, and it doesn't require the student to be a great storyteller.
00;16;32;29 - 00;16;56;25
John Azoni
You hand someone a phone, tell them a film their day, narrate what they did, done, you know, easy formula to replicate. What I described with Skyler is not a formula. It requires direction. It requires a bit of coaching and a student willing to actually open up. And that's a much harder thing to build a repeatable system around, which is exactly the problem that we are aiming to solve with our directed UGC offering.
00;16;56;25 - 00;17;19;16
John Azoni
So if you're listening to this and you're like, Yeah, I want to do more UGC, but we don't have the time, the resources, the staff to manage it. We don't have a process for getting students who are willing to participate. We've done this before and we didn't get back much that was usable. I think we've solved the majority of that and I love to chat with you and tell you how and how that could look for your college.
00;17;19;27 - 00;17;38;26
John Azoni
One of the main pillars of unveiled is that making great content should be easy on the mark and enrollment team. If the process of working with us is still causing video to be another thing you're overwhelmed by, we're not doing our jobs good enough. And the thing I loved about working with University of Montana, for instance, is they handed Skyler off to us.
00;17;39;07 - 00;17;56;10
John Azoni
We took it from there. We collaborated directly with Skyler, and the next thing they saw was videos in their inbox. They didn't even like Hop on to the remote interview call. They weren't involved in the shot list. They just kind of high level signed off on. Yeah, you know, this is the direction we want to take Skyler story.
00;17;56;10 - 00;18;19;11
John Azoni
Go ahead and run with it. And then we delivered the first draft approved, you know, first go. It was great. So and I'm like, I hope everything goes like that. And I hope people see how easy this can be when you hire a company that's already operationalized us. So that's it for this one. Thanks for listening. And if you have any good examples of UGC content that you've seen like that, email me.
00;18;19;11 - 00;18;25;08
John Azoni
John unveiled that TV. I'd love to see it. I love to see some variety of what's out there. Okay, Thanks.
