This paper explores ways in which academics construct their image as experts and promote their research to achieve their professional objectives (e.g. disseminating knowledge and getting their projects funded) by drawing on the web-mediated genre of TED talks, popularizing speeches that are freely available online and delivered by experts in different fields. For the purpose of this study, a contrastive discourse analysis is carried out by comparing a corpus of TED talks delivered by academics (TED_ac) to a corpus of university lectures (MICASE_lect) drawn from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. More precisely, consideration is given to the use of the pronoun we in the two corpora. Previous research shed light on the saliency of we in academic TED talks demonstrating that, unlike university lecturers, academic TED speakers make use of we mostly with an ‘audience-exclusive’ value, thereby presenting and marketing themselves as members of a group of researchers. Against this backdrop, drawing upon the notion of “lexical aspect” or Aktionsart, the verb collocates of we in TED_ac and MICASE_lect are analyzed on the basis of the four main lexical categories of activities, states, accomplishments and achievements to explore the discursive functions performed by the pronoun we in the two genres under scrutiny.