All Media is Now Earned Media

Reach is increasingly hard to buy.

As marketers try to sort the trends between traditional and non-traditional, online and offline, global and hyperlocal, at least one trend is clear. All media is morphing into earned media.

Earned media was typically used to distinguish from paid media.  Tools like PR and grassroots marketing that depended on some viral element to reach a large audience were put in the Earned category, and things like TV, radio, and print were put in the Paid category.  They were like apples and oranges. The common wisdom held that there was a clear trade-off between these categories. Earned media was cheaper to execute, but provided little or no control over what kind or how many people you would reach. Paid media was expensive, but provided guaranteed reach and frequency numbers that ensured the message was delivered.  The categories and the trade-off are both evaporating.

Technology and the explosion of choices have undermined guaranteed delivery.  New channels like YouTube are obvious examples of a choice medium where the viewership is entirely dependent on the nature of the content. You may get 10 views or 1 million views, but it’s impossible to predict. For every Annoying Orange, there are hundreds of thousands of unwatched puppet skits. But the even the so-called mass media are becoming increasingly choice-driven.  For example,  Morpace research estimates that almost 50% of TV viewing is via DVR, online, or other on-demand alternatives.  So even if marketers try to attach themselves to a hit show, their viewers increasingly time-shift and fast-forward past the advertising that is neither relevant nor interesting to them. The previous control over who and when your message would be seen is rapidly ebbing away.  The reach of a marketing message is increasingly dependent on the inherent value of its content regardless of the channel. That’s what we mean when we say all media is now Earned media.

Less obvious but equally true is that the low-cost perception of Earned media is also fading away.  A good press release or a publicity stunt just doesn’t go as far as it used to. The rise of social media has created more avenues for memes to rise and take hold, but also a flood of information that hastens their decline.  The competition for time and attention is more intense than ever.  So the chances of rising above the noise are less. And even if your idea does breakthrough,  it’s lifespan is much shorter because of the constant flood new work competing for the same attention spans. So even if the distribution costs of some new Earned media channels are lower (e.g. Facebook page vs. TV buy), the development costs in terms of the quality of the ideas, the frequency of the ideas, and the work required to populate those ideas with key constituencies is rising.

There are at least two implication for marketers. One is that they have to think of their messaging in terms of content. It must follow the basic principles by which we earn peoples’  interest in its own right or it will be ignored or skipped over.  This is true regardless of its form or distribution channel. The second is that they have to refresh their marketing efforts more frequently if they expect to maintain any consistent share of mind with their target.