Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

We differentiate between three types of media online: paid, owned, and earned.

Paid media are media activities you pay for. These media activities are typically performed on a third party channel (i.e., not your own website) that is paid by your company to conduct the activity. Your company controls the content, but the third party controls where this content is shown. Examples include search ads, display ads, paid influencers, paid content promotion, social media ads, product placements, and the like.

Owned media activities are media activities that are hosted on channels that you own, i.e., on your own platforms. They include your web properties (e.g., blog posts on your website) and social media channels.

Earned media activities are media impressions that you earn because your content is shared. Here, consumers (and sometimes professionals) become the channel. Shared social media posts, reviews, and other consumer-generated content such as ratings, social recommendations, content created on wikis, or forum discussions are examples of earned media activities. The coverage of your company by journalists also falls under earned media activities.

Very importantly, although these are conceptually distinct types of media activities, an ideal campaign will integrate them. For example, you can create content on your website and social media channels that you will also push by advertising on social media websites and other websites using banner ads, and you are making these efforts in the hopes that your content will be widely shared by others. This is the typical strategy underlying viral marketing campaigns.

Take, for example, the widely successful ad for Doritos during the 2020 Superbowl. Doritos created an ad that they hosted on their website and social media channels (e.g., YouTube). The ad was pushed as a paid media activity during the Superbowl to the tune of several million dollars. It was also associated with a Tik Tok hashtag campaign, #coolranchdance, which fueled earned media impressions. It is this intersection of paid, owned, and earned media activities that leads to the creation of successful online marketing campaigns!