In the age of AI, career education has never been more important. Employers are restructuring around automation. Career changers don’t need degrees; they need real skills. The students walking into these schools are making one of the highest-stakes decisions of their lives, and career colleges are providing education pathways that are genuinely essential.
Career education conference season hits differently for the Level team. These are much more like reunions than corporate calendar events.
Level's journey started deep in the higher ed and career education space. We got our start in the affiliate space before evolving into Level Interactive and ultimately becoming the Level Agency you know today. Higher ed is in our DNA.
The Becker acquisition made it official. Bill Buchanan spent years leading Becker Media before we brought the two companies together, and when he walks the conference floors now, he runs into people he's known for decades. That history doesn't show up on a capabilities deck, but it shows up in every room we spend time in together.
For-profit education still carries a reputation tax from a handful of bad actors. Anyone who actually works in this community knows the real story. Consider this my love letter to career education.
We are incredibly proud of the work we do with career schools. We've met the graduates, heard their stories firsthand, and seen how life-changing it is for someone to learn a skilled trade, advance their career, and support their family.
The team just got back from seeing many of you at CECU in Cleveland, and next up, we're heading to the CSPEN Annual Conference. If you're attending, come say hi. The Level crew will be at booth #33 with copies of our new 2026 Higher Education Benchmarks Report.
This industry made us who we are, and every year reminds me why. We're proud to still be showing up for it.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
Level Virtual Insider Session: How to effectively incorporate AI into your creative process.
Thursday, July 30 | 1 PM EDT
The debate about whether to use AI in your creative process is over. Almost every brand is using it somewhere. The question now is whether you're using it in the right places and whether you can tell the difference when you're not. The part that stays with you is the final 10%: taste, judgment, and the willingness to kill a good-enough idea.
In 30 minutes plus a live 15-minute Q&A, Level's Carly Fridhandler (AVP, Creative & AI Innovation) and Mike Rubino (AVP, Creative) will walk through where AI actually belongs in the creative process, where it makes creative worse, and what the performance data is starting to show about AI-generated ads versus human-made work.
Carly has led creative for Adidas, Walmart, and Lululemon. She's also an internationally recognized AI artist exhibited from Tokyo to Paris and named one of Forbes' top female AI artists. Her take on AI and creative isn't theoretical.
The live Q&A is where the session gets real. Bring your questions.
The Power of Story: What AI Can't Replace Featuring LaQuita Cleare, Founder of Clear Communication Academy
LaQuita Cleare has coached leaders in more than 50 countries, and she came on the show to make the case that AI has leveled the playing field on information. The only thing that separates a forgettable leader from a memorable one now is the stories they tell and how well they tell them.
Her path to that conviction is worth knowing. She was rejected from a Chicago theater workshop at eight years old, went on to spend years in Hollywood as an actress and producer, and built those experiences into a framework she now teaches executives. Her model: connection plus content plus delivery equals engagement. Most leaders skip straight to content, wonder why nobody's moved, and blame the delivery.
LaQuita draws a hard line between using AI as a ghostwriter, which she thinks actively diminishes your story, and using it as a thought partner to surface the experiences you already have. I shared how I ran years of my own meeting transcripts through an AI tool and found stories I'd been telling without realizing it. That's the version of AI and storytelling that actually works.
What it can't do: show up for you. Presence, authenticity, the willingness to fully commit to your own story. That part's still on you.
Level wins Silver at The Drum Awards for Search Level won Silver in the Search category at The Drum Awards for Marketing for "Building the System," the GEO methodology our team built with Ancora Education. It's a writing system governed by seven enforced mechanics, and every piece gets checked against all seven before it publishes. Proud of this team.
Key takeaway: A documented methodology, applied to every piece before it ships, is what makes AI visibility something you can engineer rather than stumble into.
ChatGPT commands the overwhelming majority of AI referral traffic A new study of millions of AI-driven sessions confirms what a lot of us suspected: standalone AI referral traffic is real, it's growing fast, and almost all of it comes from ChatGPT. The more useful finding is where those visitors land. The models trust your domain but often can't pick the right page, so they drop people on your internal search or a product page and let them navigate. Claude also overtook Perplexity, which matters if your buyers are technical.
Key takeaway: Treat internal search and product pages as acquisition surfaces, not navigation. That's where AI is sending your highest-intent visitors.
How should career schools respond to the 2026 Higher Education Federal Regulatory Changes? Coming off conference season, this is the piece I'd hand to anyone marketing in career education right now. The new earnings-accountability rules change the math on which programs are worth spending behind, and the strategic window isn't some future deadline. It's now. Brad's read is that the schools treating this as a program strategy signal, rather than a compliance chore, come out of the cycle stronger.
Key takeaway: If a program can't answer the "is this worth it" question a prospective student is already asking, no amount of lead-gen spend fixes it. Shift the investment before the determinations land.
Cannes Lions 2026: What the industry put on the table, and what it means for your brand
Howard Diamond attended Cannes Lions this year with a specific filter: don't just collect pitches, validate which ones hold up after the festival ends. His recap focuses on the two creative campaigns that took Grand Prix honors — and what they have in common.
AXA France added three words to its home insurance contract: "and domestic violence." That change made emergency relocation, legal support, and psychological assistance available to domestic violence victims through the same claims infrastructure AXA already used for fire and flood. In the first month, site traffic jumped 321%. New contracts rose 9.1% over six months. Brand consideration went from 43% to 67%, versus a 43% industry norm.
Heineken helped twenty-six villagers buy their last local pub when it was about to close, then built an online hub for other communities facing the same problem. The campaign has since helped four more Irish pubs survive.
Neither campaign started from award criteria. Both started from a real human problem the brand was already equipped to solve.
Howard's observation from inside the Palais is worth sitting with: the AI and ad tech on display this year was almost entirely built for the media side (buying, targeting, optimization) and mostly stayed walled off from the creative decisions happening two blocks away.
Self-promotional content in AI search: it works, until it doesn't
Ahrefs ran a four-month experiment to answer an interesting question: if you publish self-promotional content ("best of" lists, product comparison pages, listicles that include your own brand) does it actually get you recommended by AI assistants?
The answer is, sometimes, and the conditions matter more than the tactic.
For a newer conference brand with low AI awareness, self-promotional content helped establish the association. For a well-known product, it barely moved the needle. The more counterintuitive finding is what happened when AI cited those pages: 43% of the time, it cited the page but recommended a competing event featured on the same list.
Being cited and being recommended turn out to be two different things, a distinction the SEO industry is still getting comfortable with.
Most of the citation gains were also temporary. They came and went. The one condition where the tactic holds is when AI has a genuine gap in its understanding of your brand's category, and the content you publish helps close it. Existing brand trust still determines whether a citation becomes a recommendation.
It's a methodologically clean experiment on a question that matters for GEO strategy.
Fable 5 is back. Anthropic's most capable publicly available model was pulled on June 12 after the US government applied export controls following a report of a potential safeguard bypass. As of July 1, those controls have been lifted and access is restored globally on Claude.ai, Claude Platform, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.
What's actually changed: Anthropic used the pause to update its cybersecurity safeguards and is now co-developing a shared industry jailbreak severity framework with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other Project Glasswing partners. The goal is a consistent standard for assessing safeguard vulnerabilities across models, the kind of infrastructure that makes highly capable model releases safer over time.
If you've been working around its absence, you can stop. The model that handles the most complex reasoning and longest-context tasks is available again.
When did you last audit what AI thinks of your brand?
Don't rely on an unreviewed algorithm to manage your brand’s reputation. Our scorecard pulls back the curtain on how AI platforms frame your brand sentiment and which sources they use to vet your authority.
Inside your custom report:
Visibility score and share of voice: The percentage of AI prompts your brand appears in, benchmarked against your top competitors across all major models.
Sentiment and positioning: Whether AI describes your brand favorably, neutrally, or negatively, and whether you're showing up as the primary recommendation or an afterthought.
Optimization roadmap: The specific content structure and authority signals you need to improve your score.
