As Advertising Changes, Earned Media Offers Marketers Untapped Opportunity

In the early days of digital advertising, everyone knew it had great potential to drive awareness and even purchasing of their products. Then the AdTech vendors and media agencies got involved. They started using all sorts of jargon and terms to describe the value chain, a complicated ecosystem of ad servers, networks, and demand-side platforms. Some in the marketing community got it and held them accountable. The majority of the marketing community, however, liked keeping the execution out-of-sight, out-of-mind and dumped billions indiscriminately.

Now, as data on industry performance gets shared, marketers know it’s time to diversify.

According to Forrester Research, as much as 56% of all display ad dollars are lost to fraudulent or un-viewable inventory. They even went on to estimates that the total amount of display ad waste will grow to $10.9 billion by 2021. Brands in the industry are weighing in on this issue with their investment decisions. After cutting its digital ad spend by nearly $200M, Proctor & Gamble confirmed earlier this month that since that change in its media mix has had no poor impact on its business.

There’s a way to impact customer behavior and purchasing that doesn’t require an ad at all: earned media. And in the cloudy marketing world of sponsored content and influencer marketing, let’s take a purist definition: earned media is content that mentions a brand, created by people who aren't paid by that brand — such as journalists, individual influencers, and regular consumers. Marketing technology is evolving to help get value from the world of earned in ways never done before.

Earned Media Matters

Consumers foundationally trust earned media more than other mediums. Despite years of consumer attention turning to new media outlets and user-generated content, the last presidential election triggered a pendulum swing for consumers back to the traditional news. According to research from Ogilvy, traditional media is the most trusted news source of consumers (52%).

So as people learn more about products, brands and topics, they are more likely to trust reporting from professional journalists or individual people.

Earned Media Is a Customer Experience Opportunity

The world of Marketing Tech hasn’t emphasized earned media because it’s not as directly transactional medium as advertising or owned channels like the eCommerce site or email . But in reality, the consumption of content that mentions brand factors into the totality of someone’s experience or perception of that brand. While brands will always have more control over the experience of owned channels and the messaging of advertising, the ability to shape a strong earned media strategy can enhance the experience of someone who engages with them across all those channels in harmony. If you read a review about a hotel – and your experience staying their squares with what you read in the media – it will eventually all sync into the consumer’s consciousness alongside the emails and interactions on that hotel website.

Marketing Tech Is Making Earned Media Measurable. It Can Also Make Advertising Better.

The world of communications and PR hasn’t received the same type of funding as paid and owned media. That’s largely because the success was traditionally anecdotal. Clip and coverage reports do not tell CMOs, CEOs and CFOs a story of financial ROI .

But that is changing, and it’s borrowing many of the concepts of paid media.

By tracking what audiences consume earned content on news media and social sites, it can now be matched to data on a marketer’s owned properties . This allows marketing teams to know if some of those audience members consuming earned content actually came to their digital properties and purchased a product in an eCommerce setting or entered a lead gen program.

The best part is, you can tie these efforts back to advertising. If a consumer is engaged with your content on earned channels, it stands to reason they may be good candidates for advertising! So being able to take that earned media audience data, and leverage it for activation in paid, is something large brands will start to do more in the coming year.

So when you receive your next invoice for paid media, ask yourself if you might get more ROI by diversifying into the world of earned media.