Like straw fedora hats, there are some trends you like that you know won’t last. Paid Owned and Earned is the fedora hat of marketing and media circles right now. It is stylish and current, and probably destined to last only a few seasons. It’s served a useful purpose in getting people beyond the old media labels that defined channels by their mode of delivery — television, print, online, OOH, etc. But it falls short of its own intent, which is to define media by how it connects with people rather than by what it looks like.
Paid Owned and Earned uses a financial nomenclature to separate media. As such, it represents the view of the producer not the consumer. Paid Owned and Earned may mean something to the company paying the bill. But does a person really care how a message was funded? Do people react differently to a message knowing that it is “owned” rather than “paid?” Of course not. These terms also lead to odd categorizations. Is a Facebook page owned or paid? A company doesn’t have to pay for a Facebook page, and they control the content, but they don’t own it either.
When I hear the savviest media people I know talk about Paid Owned and Earned, they are really using those words to mean something else. They are trying to describe the nature of how the marketing meets the consumer.
Here’s a more useful way to think about Paid Owned and Earned. First of all, we should start with idea that all marketing is some form of content. The content can be an app, a webpage, a 30-second TV spot, or a shelf talker. If you think about all marketing as content, then you can think of media as the way that the content connects to the right person. In this model, there are three types of media:
1) Brand-t0-Person
The brand seeks out a person (or type of person) and puts the content in front of them. Ideally, it is content that the person welcomes, but they weren’t intending to find it. They went to ESPN, Huffington Post, or drove down the highway and the content came to them.
2) Person-to-Brand
The person seeks out the brand for the content they provide. They intentionally went to find it. They visited a website, downloaded an app, or searched for it. They found the content instead of the content finding them.
3) Person-to-Person
A person shares the content with another person. The brand is not directly involved in the exchange of content.
These categories are a more consumer-centered way of connecting with media. They are also more useful in understanding the role your media is playing in the marketplace. It helps you think more clearly about how to allocate your media, construct a media plan, and measure its effectiveness. The only problem is that the labels aren’t as pithy as Paid Owned and Earned. How about some suggestions?
The Ryan Report 
Reminds me of the “quantified results” discussions in the old millennium.
Nobody was able to ever quantify the results other than bottom line correlations which never seemed to work for anyone.
B2C, C2B, C2C might be a place to start….seems familiar yet maybe too old school for the digerati.
That has a nice ring to it. Thanks Terry!
Actually, the more appropriate phrasing is probably B2P, P2B, P2P. The person is the key ingredient in the mix. The method of communication is really just a cost and targeting issue anymore. Or so it seems.
T
Wanderer, Seeker, Oracle.
Not quite pithy enough, I’m afraid, as the references seem a little too “Classics Major” for the paid-owned-earned crowd.
But I like the suggestion of transformation from the unallied to the net promoter.
But this is an iterative process, right? Good thinking breeds good thinking.