Office of Marketing

Marketing Impact Report 2026

Ohio State has no shortage of stories to tell. Our job is to make sure those stories add up to something.
Three scenes of happy Ohio State students

Across the enterprise, the Office of Marketing helps create a clear and compelling Ohio State presence. A presence that reflects who we are, advances our priorities and moves audiences to action.

That means stewarding the brand while giving teams across the university the strategies, tools, platforms and insights they need to achieve their own goals. It also means bringing people and perspectives together, aligning efforts and finding opportunities for our collective work to have greater impact.

The work highlighted in this report exemplifies that approach - and points toward where we're headed next. We strengthen recognition of Ohio State as an academic and research powerhouse and elevate signature undergraduate experiences and pinnacle areas of research.

We showcase how Ohio State improves lives across Ohio; elevate the university's global reputation; and highlight Ohio State as a place where exceptional faculty and staff want to build their careers.

Different priorities. Different audiences. One Ohio State story, told with greater clarity, consistency and purpose.

Our impact by the numbers

  • 7.7M unique pageviews for osu.edu
  • 107M organic social impressions
  • 57M Salesforce Marketing Cloud emails sent
  • 482K visits to osu.edu/impact
  • 5.8M organic social engagements
  • 249K visists to brand.osu.edu
  • 73M For Ohioans paid media impressions
  • 2,384 organic social posts across all platforms
  • 1,980 websites added to university inventory
  • 350K visits to For Ohioans web content
  • 52.1M paid social impressions for undergraduate enrollment
  • 162K assets downloaded from digital asset management system

Amplifying academic and research excellence

Research impact storytelling

Through social media posts, video board content and collateral for senior leaders, Marketing is helping many audiences more easily understand the way research impacts their lives. In partnership with ERIK and the Office of the President, the new research content is generating increased engagement on social media and with audiences around Ohio State.

  • 800K impressions for research social media content (almost double FY25)
  • 3.5% engagement rate (higher than the higher ed average of 2.8% for research content)
Lunar dust animated phone mockup
Ness Shroff AI leader

Elevating AI

Through its research excellence and ambitious AI Fluency initiative, Ohio State has established itself as a higher ed leader in the AI space. Marketing has brought this excellence to multiple audiences through student storytelling and podcast episodes that highlight some of the university’s leading AI experts. This content has generated thousands of impressions online.

Ness Shroff serves as the director of the AI(X) Hub at The Ohio State University. The Hub equips researchers with advanced tools and expanded capabilities to drive innovation and accelerate discovery.

Screenshot of AI podcast episodes set 1
Screenshot of AI podcast episodes set 2
Team mascots waving

Buckeye Bridge and Regional Campus Commitment

Making the pursuit of an Ohio State degree attainable for more Ohioans is a continuous priority for the university. In collaboration with Academic Affairs, Communications and Strategic Enrollment Management, we supported the launch of two new programs in the fall of 2025. Marketing played a strategic role in naming and messaging development for Regional Campus Commitment and Buckeye Bridge. We actively promoted the programs via organic social, generating 1.3 million impressions.

  • 55K+ engagements with enterprise content
  • 1,300+ shares of enterprise content

Rankings

Ohio State’s rising rankings are making headlines. Marketing is streamlining how we share these achievements to maximize impact across social and presentation channels.
iphone mockup of social media post of nursing program
Joy Dunne hockey player

Olympics

The 2026 Winter Olympics provided us with an opportunity to highlight student achievement and research excellence at Ohio State. Through storytelling around our large women’s hockey footprint and research support of Olympic athletes, we used a high-profile moment to shine a bright light on institutional strengths. This campaign played out across enterprise social channels, university websites, video boards and other applications for both internal and external audiences.

  • 144K views on Meta and Google (paid)
  • 849K impressions from 18 organic posts
  • 56K interactions from 18 organic posts

Signature campaigns and brand

Farmer getting up into farm machine

For Ohioans

For Ohioans stories convey the power of Ohio State’s impact through compelling long- and short-form videos and written narratives. A partnership between Marketing and Communications, the campaign leverages an integrated paid, owned and earned media approach and has generated nearly 75 million paid and organic views. These stories have steadily reached a statewide audience that is learning more about how the university serves their communities.

Woman and child reading book together outside on blanket
  • 73M paid media impressions
  • 10.9M paid video views across Ohio
  • 1.8M organic social media impressions
  • 822K organic social media video views

Enrollment campaign

In collaboration with Strategic Enrollment Management, Marketing engaged in a paid media campaign to inspire choice for Ohio State, generating a strong digital presence for the university in the competitive higher-ed future student market. A new approach generated more than double the impressions in key markets year-over-year for the application component of the campaign. Similarly, yield campaign results nearly doubled year-over-year in the U.S. and Ohio.

  • 500K+ page visits generated for admissions pages during recruitment cycle
  • 52.1M impressions during application campaign (34M year-over-year increase)
The experience social post

Environmental branding

Environmental branding extends the Ohio State brand into the spaces where our community works, learns and connects. Through thoughtful use of visual storytelling, brand symbols and shared traditions, we create distinctive environments that strengthen identity and foster a sense of belonging. Each installation balances a consistent, brand-forward approach with the unique character of the space, incorporating elements ranging from dimensional buckeye leaves to innovative AI-generated artwork. Created in collaboration with partners across the university, these spaces bring the Ohio State experience to life in new ways.

Collage of environmental branding

College Football Playoff

Ohio State football’s appearance in the Co tton Bowl in Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) provided an opportunity to conduct our first campaign including out-of-home advertising on billboards, digital boards around the stadium and within airports, which gained 11.5 million impressions. Primary audiences for this were future students and their parents in the DFW region, a key market for future Ohio State students.

  • 140% increase in web traffic from the DFW region
  • 339K organic social impressions
Collage of in-person signage

Empowering marketers across Ohio State

Laptop mockup of the Research Impact at Ohio State website

Research impact website

A partnership with Ohio State’s Enterprise for Research, Innovation and Knowledge resulted in the launch of Research Impact at OhioState, a new website that highlights institutional research strengths for external audiences.

  • 13K+ unique visitors in the first year

HR new employee marketing

Marketing partnered with Human Rescues to support talent recruitment, particularly in areas of highest staff need. We analyzed staff survey results, HR insights and local competitive hirers to develop messages and recruitment materials that tout Ohio State's distinctive benefits.

Mockups of a printed flyer

BUX design system

Buckeye UX (BUX) is Ohio State’s web design system, offering standards and components to build consistent, scalable websites efficiently. In FY26, BUX expanded its resources by introducing new design principles, dark mode, and quarterly releases featuring new icons, templates, and features.
Dark mode Ohio State website in a laptop mockup
Laptop icon

Web services pilot launches

Marketing and OTDI launched a web service pilot to strengthen collaboration, align enterprise web efforts and expand support. With four sites already delivered, the initiative is demonstrating the value of a unified, scalable framework for Ohio State's digital ecosystem.

Magnifying glass data icon

Analytics leadership

Marketing's analytics team strengthened access to institutional data through new datasets, reports and dashboard training. Dashboard usage reached 200 views per week, with new FY26 reporting sources including Sprout Social, Google Ads and Go link redirections.

Gear in filter icon

Cleaner data is better data

The data quality initiative analyzed web traffic for automated bot behavior and removed over 400 million automated events and 100 million sessions, making the data cleaner and easier to interpret. 

Expanding brand visuals

In FY26, Marketing uploaded 7,812 photos to our digital asset management system. Photographers and videographers focused on imagery that shows Ohio State's priority academic and research areas. By making these visuals accessible across campus, we ensure our partners have access to a current assets that reflect Ohio State's extraordinary people, places and programs.

Collage of students and faculty across campus

Fostering community, sharing best practices

Group of coworkers mingling over ice cream

Communities of Practice

Marketing leads six communities of practice across the university ranging from creative, social media, email and more. These communities bring together marketing/communication professionals from all corners of the university to share best practices, success stories and institutional priorities. In FY26 we launched our newest COP, focused on analytics, as well as introducing skill-specific workshops to support the professional development of team members around Ohio State.

“Thank you so much for this, as a team of one in a department, it's just so hard to get to learn this stuff.”

Creative Community of Practice Sticker Design Workshop participant

Salesforce ‘Meeting of the Minds’

As institutional Salesforce Marketing Cloud leaders, we've established an active, collaborative user group for Salesforce Marketing Cloud creators across Ohio State. This community provides peer support, shares best practices and aligns distributed communicators with enterprise messaging standards.

Phone mockup of Ohio State email

Salesforce enterprise training

We created dedicated training modules for Single Journey Send, Subscription 1.0 and 2.0, and developed a contact match tool expanding self-service capabilities for Salesforce Marketing Cloud users across campus. During the year, we provided training for more than 60 Ohio State Salesforce users.

Scarlet hashtags

This year was the fourth annual Scarlet Hashtags awards program, which recognizes the accomplishments of social media professionals across campus. Areas are encouraged to submit their favorite pieces of content. Since its inception, the program has received almost 200 submissions. This year we received a record-breaking number of award submissions.

Scarlet hashtag preview with drop shadow

Most viral moments

TBDBITL knows what week it is

TBDBITL gets rivalry week started with some lighthearted fun.

  • 3.9M impressions
  • 255K engagements

2026 Brutus reveal

The Brutus reveal video helped spur earned media coverage on the NBC Nightly News and in People magazine.

  • 2.0M impressions
  • 420K engagements

High Street in the '80s

Vintage video takes audiences on a nostalgic tour of High Street.

  • 1.9M impressions
  • 103K engagements

Rivalry week trailer

A combination of current and historic football footage got our followers ready for The Game.

  • 4.3M impressions
  • 491K engagements

What professors are wearing

At Commencement, faculty members share the academic histories behind their regalia.

  • 1.1M impressions
  • 79K engagements

Brutus memories

Four Brutus Buckeye students share their best moments behind the mask.

  • 1.5M impressions
  • 103K engagements