What is Earned Media?

You may have heard someone recently say something to the effect of, “Buying media is yesterday’s news. Earning it is the future.” But what is earned media?

Earned media is publicity without payment to the person or company who provides the publicity. One of the primary reasons for the buzz is that earned media is often used synonymously with the term “free media”. The other reason for its recent buzz is that platforms for easily distributing earned media – like Facebook and Twitter – have become very popular over the past couple of years.

Despite the recent buzz, the term ‘earned media’ has been in use for more than 20 years since its first reference in a 1988 Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman. At the time, the authors were referring to broadcasting one’s message on TV or radio without any payment to the broadcaster. Since then, the application of the term broadened to include any type of mention of a company or brand in the news. This landed earned media firmly in the court of public relations professionals.

Consumer broadcasting accelerated with Email Forwards and Link Building
With the growing popularity of the internet in the late 1990’s, and email in particular, consumers began to send trillions of emails and many companies attempted to find the next big email forward hit (think dancing baby) or tell-a-friend program.

At the same time, online search engines started to give away billions of clicks for free to websites who appeared in their listing; listings were gained partially through linking between websites. Businesses, called SEOs, quickly appeared to help businesses take advantage of the opportunity and in the process have developed a $3B market for this service.

New terms emerge
As the internet boom picked up steam in 1999 and later after it deflated in the early 2000’s, the opportunities for earned media continued to grow and soon word of mouth marketing became a popular method for marketers to reach consumers. Word of mouth marketing refers to consumers telling other consumers about a product or brand with professionals focused on facilitating this process. Similar to word of mouth marketing, viral marketing refers to consumers passing along a specific marketing message to other consumers (coupons, promotions, entertainment, tools, etc.)

Social media provides consumers with drastic improvement over email for mass broadcast capabilities
More recently, social applications like Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter (ie. blogs, link sharing services, and social networks) provided consumers with a superior forum to broadcast their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Whereas previous earned media broadcast opportunities were from central authorities determining who got airplay, social applications enabled consumers to reach hundreds or thousands of people with one unfiltered broadcast. The power to guide is now in the consumer’s hands and they are actively endorsing companies, products, and ideas to their friends, family and colleagues.

The old adage that a happy customer tells two people and an unhappy customer tells 10 has now been amplified with social applications so that a happy customer tells 200 people and an unhappy customer tells 1,000.

Earned media is not reserved to social networks
Companies that earn media best always invest resources into growing the opportunity. This could be in the form of public relations, SEO, promotions, software development, customer service and hundreds of other ways to build and communicate one’s brand. In the end, earned media is the ultimate branding exercise where the company educates the public on its products and then observes how the market communicates that teaching back to itself.

If you would like additional information on this topic or to meet with an advisor to discuss earned media, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

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