Impressions Aren't Attention: Why Good Decisions Need More Than One Vantage Point
This post is part of OnDeck & OffScript, our ongoing series that features the voices of today’s marketing, communications, and enrollment leaders across higher education. We love talking about awareness spending, budget tensions, AI in higher ed, and enrollment strategy. We're equally curious about whatever's on your mind. Got something to say? Tell us about it.
Jim Sheets started his career under a boss who held one standard for every newspaper ad: it had to land at the exact spot where a reader's thumb naturally rests when holding the paper open. Anything less than that exact spot did not count.
Sheets, Director of Graduate & Professional Studies Recruiting and Strategic Initiatives at Roberts Wesleyan University in Rochester, New York, has spent nearly 30 years in admissions since that first standard was set, watching recruitment move from newspaper placements and billboards to geofencing, texting, and video messaging. The channels transformed completely. What Sheets learned from watching that change is less about any single channel and more about how easily a good decision gets made on an incomplete picture.
No Campus Fits the Same Playbook
Sheets has watched that incomplete picture show up in a different form: a strategy built for one institution, applied somewhere it does not fit. "Best practices are good, but best practices don't always work in every institution," he says. "Unless you have a true understanding of who you are as an institution, those best practices might not work. We're in the Northeast. If we have people who come to us from the Bible Belt, best practices for schools in that area might not be best practices for here, even though they've been really successful."
The strategy worked where it came from. It carried assumptions about a student, a region, and an identity that did not travel with it. A practice's success is tied to the specific campus that produced it, and treating it as universal is where the decision goes wrong.
When the Radio Oversold
Decades later, Sheets watched a similar gap open up when a radio partner sold him scale instead of a full picture. "I worked with a radio station that was really hyping, at one point, that whenever we did this radio ad, our website would get so many impressions," he says. "But it would never materialize into actual leads. You could give me 5 million impressions. If that doesn't turn into something that helps us turn them into actual students, I don't care how many impressions we get."
An impressions count is one vantage point on a campaign, and on its own it is an incomplete one. It says a message went out. It says nothing about whether it landed with anyone who mattered. A marketing budget defended on that single number can look justified on paper while converting nothing, and by the time the gap surfaces, the money is already spent.
A Different Gap, Same Building
The same precision that matters outside an institution matters inside one too. Sheets has watched brand strategy and student-facing recruiting build different vantage points on the same student inside his own institution. "When you have your recruiters out on the road, when you have your admissions folks out there, they have a different perspective," he says. "They hear what people are looking for, they understand the types of programs people want, and it might not fully fit into the brand the institution is promoting."
The same principle plays out in something as specific as an email sequence. Sheets's marketing team follows a standard cadence, waiting 24 hours and then another 72 before the next message goes out, a cadence built on real testing and real data. His recruiters hear a different piece of the picture directly from students. "We're getting feedback from prospective students saying, 'Man, I don't even look at your emails anymore,'" Sheets says.
Both perspectives are completely valid. The “best practice” marketing data captures what tends to work across a large pool of students. The recruiter feedback captures what a particular student is feeling in the moment they decide whether to open the next message. Sheets treats both as pieces of the same picture. "I would love to have some of our marketing folks go on the road with some of our recruiters, just to give them a different perspective," he says. Getting both perspectives into the same room before the messaging and the placement get decided is what lets the positioning that reaches a student reflect what marketing has learned and what recruiting is hearing in real time.
Presence Starts Before the Ad Runs
An institution's precision on the outside depends on its departments reading the student the same way on the inside. Get that alignment wrong and every ad placed afterward is aimed at a version of the student who does not quite exist.
Nearly 30 years of channels have come and gone since Sheets's boss set that standard for where an ad had to land. The lesson traveled with him the whole way: presence works when it lands in the right place, at the right moment, for the people already looking for it, and no single vantage point ever sees that whole picture alone.
That's the gap worth checking: where does your presence land with precision, and where is it only accumulating?
Jim Sheets is the Director of Graduate & Professional Studies Recruiting and Strategic Initiatives at Roberts Wesleyan University. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with leaders across higher education. Got something to share? Join the conversation.
