As a copywriter, a fundamental question guiding my approach is: how do you tell a compelling story in today’s digital environment? 

It starts by thinking about how to repay the attention prospective students are being asked to invest. 

That means taking seriously the idea that attention is not strictly captured. It’s what comes about when a reader can recognise something as worth selecting from the noise around it. 

So, if you communicate your university’s story in a way that’s more concerned with capture than cultivation, you may have a click, but you might not have a reader. 

Because reading requires attention. And an economy is, or at least should be, a two-way street. 

These questions aren’t new. But the context in which writers need to think about them has changed. 

When Herbert Simon coined the idea of the ‘attention economy’ in his lecture ‘Designing Organisations for an Information-Rich World’ (1971), he wasn’t thinking about storytelling; he was thinking about corporate administration, information overload and the limits of organisational decision-making. 

That origin matters for writers because the metaphor carries assumptions with it. In Simon’s context, attention was part of a problem of processing: how systems, organisations and executive decision-makers cope with too much information.  

In university campaign copy, the task is different. We are writing for prospective students making a personal, motivated choice, one based on where they might belong and what they might become. 

If we write copy from a place of anxious desperation to chase immediate notice, we may miss the point that our reader’s decision depends on something more demanding: relevance, trust, recognition and a reason to stay and explore. 

From capturing attention to cultivating it  

Alternative cognitive accounts position attention as the result of selection: the point someone reaches after narrowing the field and deciding what deserves focus. 

For copywriters, this sharpens the question: why should this story be selected, stayed with and trusted? Those who are taking this question seriously will know that the speed of the digital environment means taking more care with words, not less.  

If capture becomes the main ambition, campaign copy can lose sight of the work that matters after the first glance: cultivating attention through substance. This involves giving the prospective student something worth their time and concentration. 

After all, if you only get to genuine attention by filtering out distractions, then your story needs to be worth singling out and spending time with.  

That should make us cautious about easy, frictionless messages in a digital environment already shaped by speed and ease of choice. The job is to be clear without adding to the conditions that make meaningful selection harder. 

So, how do you tell a compelling story in today’s digital environment?  

It starts by thinking about how to repay the attention your reader is being asked to invest. 

And it ends when you’ve delivered something with enough substance to keep your reader focused to the very final word.