The University of East Anglia won In-House Team of the Year at the inaugural East Anglian Marketing Awards, recognising the 36-strong marketing team behind the university’s strategic, creative and digital work.
Spanning Digital & Automation, Strategic Marketing and Corporate Marketing, the team works across a huge range of audiences and projects, from bringing UEA’s ‘Original by Nature’ brand to life to transforming digital journeys and shaping recruitment strategy.
Their entry put the spotlight not just on the work itself, but on the people, collaboration and culture behind it – particularly the trust that gives team members the freedom to take ownership, experiment and bring their own expertise to the table.
The team was presented with the award by Tait Pollack of Pivotal, who sponsored the category.
We caught up with the team to find out what the win meant to them, what they’re most proud of and what they think makes a brilliant in-house marketing team. The answers below were written collaboratively by the UEA marketing team.
Q: Big congratulations, team! How did it feel to hear UEA announced as In-House Team of the Year?
A: We were shocked but absolutely delighted! Having external recognition like this means a huge amount to us – being in-house isn’t always as glamorous as attending a glittering awards night! Our entry deliberately focused on the people doing the day-to-day work – our interns, assistants, coordinators and officers – so it was particularly lovely to see their contributions recognised on a regional stage, especially one that celebrates all the amazing talent and potential in East Anglia (we’re big fans of the place ourselves😉).
Marketing in higher education can be complex, fast-moving and honestly, right now, pretty challenging. There’s an enormous amount happening behind the scenes that people outside the team never see, let alone outside the university. The bulrush green colour that increasingly invokes UEA is the external identity that conceals a multitude of strategic and tactical projects. Winning felt like recognition not just of the work we produce and the partnerships we manage, but of the people, collaboration and culture that make it possible.
Q: With a 36-strong team spanning Digital & Automation, Strategic and Corporate Marketing, how do you make sure everyone works together rather than becoming siloed?
A: It takes conscious effort and we don’t claim to do it perfectly. With three specialist areas within Marketing alone, silos can easily develop, but almost nothing we deliver sits neatly within one team. We do what we can to create an open environment where we can be individually proactive with the support of our teams. We actively try to identify links and grasp opportunities to do things better and duplicate as little as possible.
Take our Higher Education Fair project as an example. It needed our strong new brand and tone of voice to ‘lean into the green’ and therefore support from Corporate Marketing. But the paid media campaign, the printed takeaways, the storytelling framework came from Strategic Marketing. And the web development, CRM journeys and subsequent analytics came from the Digital & Automation Team. All of that involves agency partners, and of course the Recruitment and Admissions Teams, to plan and staff the Fairs.
Collaboration is built into how we work because otherwise it all falls apart. We have tactic and steering groups crossing team, agency and department boundaries, shared campaign planning and regular opportunities to talk about what we’re doing and learning. We’re guided by shared marketing objectives, strategy and planning, ensuring that individual projects contribute to wider recruitment, reputation and engagement goals.
There’s also a rhythm to the week. We share priorities and blockers, have regular show-and-tells, spend time together in person and celebrate each other’s successes. Knowledge is shared generously and asking for help is completely normal. We have some brilliant specialists, but the magic tends to happen when their specialisms overlap.
Q: What are you most proud of the team achieving over the last year?
A: It’s almost impossible to pick one thing, which is probably why our award entry became so long! (Sorry, judges).
But to continue a little from the previous questions, we’ve refreshed the UEA brand with Original by Nature as our brand essence and brought it to life across everything from those HE fairs and our CRM to an origami rabbit sent to offer holders during their exams. Every single one of us has been involved. We’ve transformed our digital web journeys, developed inclusive outreach guidance, and used detailed Open Day analysis to influence future recruitment strategy. Our new undergraduate Vision has been created in the bulrush-green light of macro trends, competitors and rankings. We’ve also produced a plethora of updated photographs and video to reflect the new brand.
And there have been some fantastic measurable results: growth in enquirers, increased followers, stronger engagement, clearer proof points, campaigns delivered more efficiently and creative made more strikingly.
We’re probably proudest of the fact that these weren’t isolated projects but a coherent identity and a better understanding of what we want UEA to be known for. We’re not done yet, either. Each iteration will build on what we learn going forward as we action the long-term strategic direction for the university, shaping campaigns based on insight and analysis.
Above: Tait Pollack from Pivotal [left] presents the award to the UEA team.
Q: The nomination talks about trust being central to how the team works. What does that look like in practice?
A: Trust at UEA means giving people genuine ownership rather than simply handing them a task and telling them how to complete it. There are simply too many interested parties and too many projects not to, and we find people do their best work when they are coached and encouraged to fulfil their own projects.
Ideas are encouraged from anywhere in the team. We have dedicated time and resource to test and learn, to question established ways of working and say when we think something could be better. Not everything ‘works’ – and that’s OK. We’d much rather understand why and apply that learning next time than create a culture where people become afraid to try.
In the nomination, one of our colleagues described joining UEA lacking confidence and initially being too nervous to present at a whole-team meeting. With support and mentoring, she has progressed to delivering regular presentations and training sessions independently – with great feedback at that. For us, this is trust in action: giving someone the space, support and confidence to discover what they’re capable of.
Q: What makes marketing in a university environment particularly interesting or challenging?
A: UEA is essentially a small town with multiple organisations and priorities – and a global footprint. Our audiences include prospective and current students, parents, teachers, researchers, employers, alumni, funders and civic partners – and that’s before you consider colleagues across academic schools and professional services.
There are lots of stakeholders, lots of expertise and, inevitably, lots of opinions. A single project can involve hundreds of people. I think it’s fair to say that makes it both interesting and challenging.
The cost-of-living crisis, changing Government policy – particularly around international students – and debate in the media about the value of higher education and worries around loans are all having an impact on us. But on the flipside, what we’re marketing is extraordinary. You get to watch people make a life-changing choice and tell the whole story: the friendships, the learnings, the career that follows. And you get to showcase all the great research and civic projects that change the lives of everyday people in the region and across the globe! That gives the work real purpose; it’s not just interesting or challenging, it’s genuinely fulfilling to hear those transformative stories.
Above: Charlotte Gaines pictured giving an acceptance speech on behalf of the University of East Anglia marketing team.
Q: How do you encourage creativity and innovation within such a large and varied team?
A: A lot goes into the mix here. Part of it comes back to ownership, proactivity and giving people permission to ask questions and be curious.
Another part is making the most of the diversity of our team. As ‘t-shaped’ marketers in a big team we often work in a more specialist area – but that doesn’t mean we don’t have other skills and experiences. Our team brings knowledge from an eclectic collection of backgrounds – agency and in-house, public and private sector, and industries ranging from insurance and teaching to perfume and windows! That diversity is hugely valuable, and it also means that even in a busy environment, we make space for people to explore questions and develop ideas that come from their own passions, their own worlds.
Being “Original by Nature” seems like a lot to live up to, until you realise that we all have that within us already, and it’s part of our team’s DNA to let people bring their authentic selves to work.
We also actively share knowledge through show-and-tells, training, best-practice groups and everyday conversation. People are encouraged to bring the outside in, challenge assumptions and experiment, something that is particularly important at a time when technology development is even more rapid than it was a few years ago.
Innovation doesn’t always have to mean something enormous. It can be interactive emails that capture better audience data, a new use of AI, changing a webpage after watching how people actually use it, or putting postgraduate marketing on a pizza box. Small ideas add up to big results.
UEA’s Advice for entering awards
It was absolutely brilliant to pause, to write about a project we were proud of, and pull it all together. Whether we had won or not, that process was in and of itself recognition, learning and confidence-building for all of us.
Tell the judges what you love about your team, what you’re proud of, what you’ve learnt. You never know, you might be writing a winner’s interview next year!
Q: What do you think makes a brilliant in-house marketing team?
A: Diversity of skills, life experiences, knowledge and outlook – and with it, the openness to question, seek new opportunities and generate new ideas.
In-house teams live and breathe the organisation – that can be a huge advantage so long as we continue to look beyond our walls to learn, listen and evolve. We understand UEA’s quirks, audiences, and stakeholders better than anyone else.
A brilliant team combines deep institutional knowledge with an appetite to keep developing and the right support from leaders. People need to feel able to challenge each other constructively, share expertise, use data as evidence and recognise assumptions. Results are even better if the team cares about the outcome beyond the day-to-day business; we’re so lucky here that we see the evidence of what we do in outcomes for students from all backgrounds.
Q: What would you say to other in-house marketers who sometimes feel they’re overlooked compared with agency teams?
A: That we have more in common than you might imagine! We’ve all seen the memes, but in-house marketers shouldn’t underestimate themselves. A lot of the time, in-house marketers have been agency marketers, and vice versa.
Agency partners bring enormous value and a different perspective – we work with some fantastic ones – but in-house teams have a depth of knowledge that can’t be easily replicated by an outside organisation.
In-house marketers are often the ones that take the shiny pitch and make it work with a legacy tech stack, challenging stakeholders and budget restrictions. We’re skilled at tweaking ideas for our audiences, the key decision makers, the IT architecture and the numerous other projects and policies already in place. And we’re the ones that live and work with the results afterwards, learning from our experiences and applying that knowledge to future campaigns.
Some of the best in-house marketing is almost invisible because it looks effortless from the outside. We’re so grateful to Awards like the EAMAs for helping to bring that work into the spotlight.
Q: What advice would you give to someone considering entering the EAMAs in 2027?
A: Go for it!
Marketing never stops and we were guilty of working through our to-do lists and running around the wheel from planning to wash-up without taking a step back to see just how much we’d achieved between campaigns and road map projects.
Especially given the challenges in higher education right now, it was absolutely brilliant to pause, to write about a project we were proud of, and pull it all together. Whether we had won or not, that process was in and of itself recognition, learning and confidence-building for all of us.
Our entry wasn’t glossy, but it was authentic; a conglomeration of stories from real marketing humans working in lots of different parts of the team – data, content, web, CRM, strategy, paid media, videography.
Tell the judges what you love about your team, what you’re proud of, what you’ve learnt. You never know, you might be writing a winner’s interview next year!
Why We’re Sharing This
At the East Anglian Marketing Awards, we want to celebrate the breadth of marketing talent across our region – and that includes the brilliant in-house teams working behind the scenes within some of East Anglia’s biggest and most complex organisations.
UEA’s story is a brilliant example of what a large in-house team can achieve when different specialisms, experiences and perspectives come together. From refreshing the university’s brand and transforming digital journeys to using insight and analysis to shape recruitment strategy, their work shows the breadth of what modern in-house marketing can deliver.
We’re sharing this interview to celebrate UEA’s well-deserved win, and to give other marketers a glimpse into the people, culture and collaboration behind the work.