Anyone Can Fill a Spreadsheet. Not Everyone Can Move a Student.

The antidote for platform myopia is an audience-first mindset.

There’s no shortage of threats to the success of higher education marketing. So much so that we’re constantly throwing out playbooks or casting aside approaches as no longer relevant. And when change feels never-ending, it’s worth remembering a point from Ehrenberg-Bass’s Jenni Romaniuk (to paraphrase): jumping from bandwagon to bandwagon creates the illusion of progress, but so often we’re just moving in circles.

In media planning, it’s almost harder to find an article that doesn’t reference AI or automation as changing everything. There are real challenges and opportunities for the practice, and for how institutions of higher education can use it more effectively. But progress in the platforms will make the craft more efficient, and that progress will be driven by the platforms themselves.

What will separate those who support higher ed is not just where they focus, but how that focus shapes the support they offer. The crux is how they respond to two big shifts.

Shift 1: Fragmentation

The channels marketers have traditionally used to reach students are losing their hold on student attention.

The amount of time students spend with ads and ad-supported platforms is declining.

• Only 2 minutes of time spent on social media is spent with ads
• Attention is dispersing across more environments (streaming, gaming, live experiences, out-of-home) rather than concentrating in open social platforms

Regulation and data privacy are accelerating that dispersion.

• Government restrictions on youth social media access, nationwide
• Data privacy legislation limiting how advertisers collect and use audience data
• Platforms are losing their function as reliable youth marketing infrastructure

Time spent is fragmenting across more media, not consolidating.

• No single environment commands the attention social once did
• Reach now requires presence across a broader, harder-to-predict mix of channels

Shift 2: An even messier middle

The moments marketers have traditionally used to identify and reach in-market students are disappearing.

Zero-click is the new default.

• 60% of searches end with no click
• Google Zero is accelerating this. AI-generated answers mean students get information without ever visiting an institutional page

Students are less likely to fill out a form and more likely to shop anonymously.

• 80% of prospects research schools independently and anonymously. By the time a student raises their hand, the decision is largely already made

Gen Z and younger audiences don’t click on ads.

• 88% of 18- to 24-year-olds who use TikTok weekly claim they do not click on ads

Taken together, the glaring takeaway is that the signals marketers have relied upon are becoming less reliable. Unfortunately, for many the instinct will be to double down. Progress through more: more search, more retargeting, and more ways to bring these fading signals into focus. But if decades of behavioral data have taught us anything, it’s that engagement is a lagging indicator.

Platform myopia: When the metric becomes the mission.

When signals weaken, the instinct is rarely to question the model. It’s that instinct that creates a kind of platform myopia, a narrowing of focus so complete that the metric becomes the mission. In fact, this is why planning so often starts in spreadsheets and not with the audience. There’s confidence in what makes us comfortable.

And as AI automates the operational layer (the bidding, the targeting, the optimization checklists), that spreadsheet will fill itself faster than ever. It’s exactly what Audience Expansion, Performance Max, and dynamic delivery all want. So institutions of higher education need agency partners that move beyond the parameters of just media buying. To us, that means moving beyond an exhaustive analysis of cost-per-click to a campaign-level view of what moves audiences and how that movement relates to actual outcomes.

Audience-first, not automation.

We’ve already started to see it. The narrowing of the view creates a slow shift from people to platforms. Perhaps an acceptance of the inevitable? Or perhaps an outcome of valuing perceived performance. In either case, the audience becomes an input rather than the foundation, and we’re left with an understanding built entirely from black boxes.

We must reclaim the most fundamental component of planning: the audience. More than a half century ago, media planners started with four basic questions:

• Why should our audience notice our communications?
• How does our plan help to build relationships with our audiences?
• How can we gain a competitive advantage with our media choices?
• How do these choices support our brand position?

Media may have been more monolithic, but we can quickly see that more value has since been placed on building relationships with platforms than with people. For SimpsonScarborough, being audience-first isn’t just a mindset. It’s embedded in our practice from the start. Most importantly, it shifts what we typically see as the starting point of the planning process (the plan, the channel) and places the audience firmly in focus.

Traditional media planning

• Starts with the media plan
• Guided by demographic assumptions
• Channel selection driven by platform availability
• Reach defined by what’s buyable
• Reporting confirms activity
• Accountable to the campaign

Audience-first media planning

• Starts with the audience
• Guided by context, motivations, and journey states
• Channel selection driven by where attention and influence exist
• Reach defined by what’s meaningful
• Reporting reveals understanding
• Accountable to the institution

The audience is the lighthouse.

In literature, the lighthouse is most often a symbol of hope, harbor, and guidance, a fixed light cast outward into the dark. There’s an easy analogy here: it’s the marketer’s job to illuminate.

But that analogy gets the practice of media planning backwards. The marketer shouldn’t ascend the lighthouse. The lighthouse is the audience — the thing navigators read and steer by. This is exactly what’s needed to stop orienting ourselves around platforms and reorient around what matters: the audience.