Praise for

PAID, OWNED, EARNED“Paid, Owned, Earned is an indispensable source of knowledge for

anyone involved in the front line of marketing in the digital age. It covers all aspectsof consumer engagement in an accessible and thought-provoking style.”

John Taylor, Chairman, ZenithOptimedia Worldwide

“Nick’s book is easily the most complete and actionable contribution to date to the‘Paid, Owned, Earned’ conversation. And it comes at a time when the power andpotential of “earned media” is driving really hard yet urgent questions across the

enterprise: how to fund community managers, how to ‘socialize’ offline assets likeTV and packaging, how to think about ‘profit center’ versus ‘cost center’ aspect of

customer service. He’s easily ‘earned’ this testimonial.”Pete Blackshaw, Nestlé Global Head of Digital Marketing and Social Media and

author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000

“Paid, Owned, Earned should be required reading for anyone who works in mediaand marketing. This isn’t just the future but the present. If you’re not sure why yourcareer hasn’t taken off or why your products aren’t selling it may be because you

don’t understand the concepts so thoughtfully articulated in this book.”Shiv Singh, Global Head of Digital, PepsiCo Beverages and author of Social Media

Marketing for Dummies

“Paid, Owned, Earned is essential to understanding the new marketing landscape.In this book Nick Burcher not only explains how everything from search to social toTV is inter-connected, but tells you how to succeed. Ignore this book at your peril!”

Mike Moran, Chief Strategist at Converseon and author of Do It Wrong Quickly and co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc

“In a fragmented media landscape that is in constant change it is difficult foradvertisers to get an understanding of the underlining dynamic and constantlychanging concepts. Nick clearly understands both the theory and the practical

implications and this book will help advertisers to enter the stage better dressed and more qualified.”

Rene Rechtman, Head of AOL EMEA / CEO goviral

“Paid, Owned, Earned is the most misunderstood phenomenon of the social media revolution. This book is the first grown-up work that seeks to understand

and explain the connection between the different elements without a biased view from one side of the triangle.”

Greg Grimmer, Founder, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer

ISBN: 978-0-7494-6562-9E-book ISBN: 978-0-7494-6563-6RRP: £19.99Publication date: March 2012 Paperback, 296pp, 234 x 156mm

NICK BURCHER is Head Of Social Media and DigitalInnovation at ZenithOptimedia Worldwide, one of theworld’s largest global media services agencies and a partof the Publicis Groupe. With 15 years industry experience,he has worked across the whole spectrum of Paid, Owned,Earned (including social media for five years). Workingwith a wide range of UK and international clients, Nick has further built his reputation through both speaking atindustry events and maintaining his own social mediapresences at www.nickburcher.com and, more recently,www.paidownedearned.com

www.koganpage.com

Today’s marketing is complex with a myriad of different communicationoptions available. Anyone can publish anything at anytime and all of thiscan be found through Search Engines and shared through social networkreferrals, email, mobile and more. This book aims to be a playbook forthe new landscape, making sense of the complexity by using the PaidOwned Earned concept to categorise the options and explore howmarketing returns can be maximized by linking everything together.

Amongst the questions addressed are:• How should an organisation structure to maximize the potential

across Paid Owned Earned?

• How can listening to the social conversations of consumers powerofferings across an organisation?

• How can existing assets be maximized and how should effectivecontent initiatives be planned, developed and executed?

• How can content be optimized and what are the most effectiveseeding and distribution strategies?

• What are the optimal strategies for community / Facebook Pagemanagement and what should the approach be to reacting andresponding to consumers?

• How can TV and mass media advertising be fused with search /social / mobile?

• How can performance paid media be used to boost everything?

• How should objectives be set and what are the optimal ways ofmeasuring success across Paid Owned Earned activity?

The above (and more) are all answered through the various stories andcase studies from across the world – with updates and supplementaryinformation posted regularly on the various Paid Owned Earned socialspaces that have been created in support of the main text.

Welcome to Paid Owned Earned!Nick Burcher

A Message from the Author:

Paid, Owned, Earned 1

Paid, Owned, Earned2

Excerpt taken from Chapter 1

Explaining how paid, owned and

earned link togeter

The media landscape has become significantly more complicated inrecent years, and the execution of marketing and advertisingcampaigns has become more challenging. An October 2010 article inthe Huffington Post saw Kirk Cheyfitz write:

There is angst in ad land over the complexity of media. Ad planners wring theirhands, bemoaning the proliferation of media channels and the unpredictableways in which consumers jump from TV to Facebook to text messages toGoogle to foursquare to iPods... and so on. What’s a brand to do? Out of thechaos in the media world and the complexity of infinite digital channels, a newway of looking at media is emerging that is simple, useful and strategic. Thelatest buzz in advertising puts all media in just three categories: paid, ownedand earned.21

Cheyfitz argues that these labels are useful because, ‘No matter whatnew media channels the geniuses invent tomorrow, this logical set ofstrategic categories doesn’t change.’ Paid, owned and earned channelsdo not exist in isolation, though. They work side by side; they overlapand all affect each other. Sean Corcoran of Forrester in December 2009put forward some initial thoughts on this. He suggested:

• Paid – ‘The role: Shift from foundation to a catalyst that feedsowned and creates earned.’

• Owned – ‘The role: Build for longer-term relationships withexisting potential customers and earn media.’

• Earned – ‘The role: Listen and respond – earned media isoften the result of well-executed and well-coordinated ownedand paid media.’22

Paid, Owned, Earned 3

In early posts on the subject of paid, owned, earned, Daniel Goodall, amarketing planner at Nokia, detailed the Nokia approach in a couple ofblog posts on his All That Is Good blog, explaining that Nokia have beenusing a ‘media trinity’ of bought (paid), owned and earned and that allNokia digital activity is attributed accordingly.23 An important elementof his thinking aimed to explain the benefits of each of the three, andhe mapped them on to an axis showing ‘control’ and ‘reach’.24 Ownedhas the most control but smallest reach, followed by paid, and thenearned, which has the least control but the highest potential reach. Thisis one of the trade-offs in paid, owned, earned thinking; benefiting fromthe amplification potential of earned media is invariably the result ofgiving up elements of control. The greater the control of the message,the lower the risk, but the less potential there is for spread. Lesscontrol equals more potential for earned media amplification, but morepotential for trouble too. (There are no easy answers here, but it isworth thinking about this at the beginning of the process!)

Planning and executing across paid, owned, earned

Traditionally there was little overlap between the three areas of paid,owned, earned, but in digital media, particularly on social platforms,things get more confused. It’s not just that things work alongside eachother, but that each area drives another too. In a socially connectedworld every action creates a reaction. My version of the media trinity(Figure 1.3) seeks to express the dynamic interactions of each area toshow how paid, owned and earned media work together and thepotential flow of communication between them. The arrows are thekey element of this representation, though, as they highlight thateverything is linked together and nothing stands alone. (See Figure1.3.)

Paid, Owned, Earned4

Figure 1.3 The media trinity

• Paid media drives traffic to the owned media destination, theclassic ‘go here now’ advertising, but paid media can nowdrive owned media engagement and create earnedconversation. Speaking at the Cannes Festival in 2011, JeffreyGraham from Initiative ‘told delegates that getting the correctmix of paid, owned and earned could transform a lowinvolvement brand into a high one’.25

• An interesting owned space or piece of owned content candrive earned conversation, which in turn can drive more trafficto the owned destination, which in turn can drive furtherconversation and so on. (As we will see at different points inthis book, effective owned media content can also help paidmedia advertisements to work harder.)

Paid, Owned, Earned 5

• Earned media conversations can highlight owned mediaspaces and turn them into vibrant communities.Conversations and sharing can also aid the effectiveness ofpaid messages (for example, the TV advertisement that getsshared on YouTube or the earned media conversations thatproduce natural search results, which help paid search towork harder and so on) and, as noted earlier, the earnedmedia conversation also provides a feedback loop from whichinsight can be harvested to inform paid (and owned) strategy.

An intriguing aspect is that some of the newer platforms are seen inall three areas. ‘Doing something on Facebook’ can sit anywherewithin paid, owned or earned, as, like other social networks, Facebookoffers a range of different routes for brand involvement. Depending onwhat it is, Facebook activity is able to deliver against a range ofdifferent objectives (from awareness to relationship building andadvocacy). A Facebook strategy can therefore take many forms.

Paid advertising on Facebook can work as it does elsewhere on thenet (driving off-site to an advertiser destination), but can also be usedto promote brand activity inside Facebook. Owned media can be aFacebook brand page or profile, a customized tab on the Facebookpage, a Facebook place or Facebook deal, an application that sits insideFacebook, a Facebook event or even Facebook functionality integratedinto a brand’s main website. Earned media can be Facebook userstalking about a brand between themselves, setting up their own groupor page about the brand, ‘liking’ an advertisement or brand page,leaving comments on a brand’s page, agreeing to attend an event orinviting friends to participate in a competition or promotion. All of theseelements are trackable and provide data and feedback on user actions,allowing campaign elements to be optimized accordingly.

The Facebook landscape is therefore complex, with paid, owned andearned initiatives all possible, and interlinking, on the same platformand sometimes even coexisting in the same advertisement unit! For

Paid, Owned, Earned6

example, Sponsored Stories are paid placements that can be used toshowcase user interactions on the site and on 4 May 2011 Volkswagenran a paid media Facebook advertisement, with the placementcontaining an owned media video and earned media (‘Like’ button)functionality – paid, owned, earned all working together.26 This clearlygets more complicated once other media channels are factored in andeverything starts to feed everything else.

Indeed, at Cannes Graham stressed that there was a need to ‘createa virtuous cycle of involvement’, with research showing that ‘therelationship between paid, earned and owned is not linear. The threetypes work together in a dynamic way and are most powerful whenthe consumer is truly involved, driving the relationship.’27

So we start to see that everything is linked and nothing exists inisolation any more, especially on social platforms. Rather than replacingthe pre-existing media channels, earned media is booming alongsidethem, backing up G Franz’s idea that ‘the proliferation of new mediaadds complexity to the media landscape, since these new mediachannels rarely replace old media. Rather they tend to complement.’28

Working with paid, owned, earned – always-on versus

campaign

In order to effectively plan and execute across paid, owned, earned,there is first a need to understand the differences between the always-on presence and campaign-based activity.

As discussed earlier, the nature of the web means that consumers expectadvertisers to have some sort of permanently accessible, 24/7 presenceonline, and more and more expect this to be interactive and responsive.Owned media is important in fulfilling against this always-on expectation.The brand website offers information, contact forms and, in an increasingnumber of cases, e-commerce, whilst social presences on platforms likeFacebook and Twitter facilitate frictionless dialogue.

Paid, Owned, Earned 7

TABLE 1.1 Executional options

On the other hand, campaign-based activity will tend to harnesselements from across the paid, owned, earned trinity and is used todeliver specific messages against specific objectives, normally acrossa limited time period. Furthermore, whether by design or default, thissort of activity will also have a knock-on effect for always-on spaces,driving traffic, fan numbers and engagement levels (an effect that canbe amplified if the activity is effectively optimized).

The variety of executional options now available can therefore beallocated against paid, owned, earned and split out between ‘always-on’ and ‘campaign’ (with always-on tending to be a longer-termcommitment that crosses multiple departments, whereas campaignswill tend to be more specific and time sensitive). (See Table 1.1.)

The following chapters will cover the above and will group them intonine general areas, with a chapter dedicated to each. These roughly fallin line with the chronological process for managing campaigns acrosspaid, owned and earned:

Paid, Owned, Earned8

• Chapter 2 – listening (mining the feedback loop for insightand determining objectives and strategy);

• Chapter 3 – creation and management of social content hubs(creating always-on hubs and starting to participate inconversation);

• Chapter 4 – creation of (campaign) content;• Chapter 5 – social media optimization (optimizing content

hubs and content campaigns to enhance visibility andpotential for sharing);

• Chapter 6 – seeding and distribution (for driving advocacy andgenerating content spread);

• Chapter 7 – broadcast (using mass-media advertising togenerate owned and earned media traction);

• Chapter 8 – performance advertisements (using performanceoriented paid media advertising to drive fan bases andattention for initiatives);

• Chapter 9 – responding (conversation strategy and customerservice);

• Chapter 10 – measurement (across paid, owned and earned).

Different strategic objectives require different solutions, and it is rarefor all the areas above to be used in the same campaign (thoughlistening and measurement should be used in some form on everycampaign and every piece of activity, regardless of the channel orproduct).

Paid, Owned, Earned 9

Budgeting and measurement

The final conundrum is around budgeting and measurement. In thepast the bulk of the budget would go on paid media, but now thateverything is interlinked perhaps one of the hardest challenges is howto allocate budget across the three areas of paid, owned and earned.

Paid media is a known known; impressions and eyeballs areguaranteed (though admittedly this is a guaranteed opportunity to seerather than a guarantee that someone will actually see it). The cost ofowned media development and hosting is known in advance (thougheffectiveness is predicted rather than guaranteed).However, earned media is almost a complete unknown; it is inherentlyunpredictable, as it relies on the actions of the public.

We can try to work this thinking into equations that need to be solvedto evaluate the most effective way of executing activity and deliveringROI. For example (purely using figures that are easy to add up andillustrate the point!):

Traditional equation:

Paid 95 + owned 5 = 95 impressions + 0 conversations = 95

New equation with a greater emphasis on content:

Paid 85 + owned 10 = 85 impressions + 15 conversations = 100

New equation with an even greater emphasis on content, plus seedingactivity designed to drive conversation:

Paid 75 + owned 15 + earned 5= 75 impressions + 30 conversations = 105

Paid, Owned, Earned10

The equations represent the idea that earned media investmentcoupled with additional commitments to content can lead to greaterreturns when combined with traditional paid media. It may then bepossible to realize these greater returns on a reduced marketingbudget overall.

If all three areas are measured side by side, it is possible to build uplearnings over time, and these benchmarks can then make it easier tostart to form (and solve) the equations that model different scenariosaround paid, owned, earned. There is no magic, one-size-fits-allformula, though. The scale of the conversation will vary by brand, byproduct and by content and will be affected by everything else that isgoing on in the world. (Share of conversation is harder to model thanshare of market!)

The other thing that should not be forgotten or overlooked is that inthe traditional equation the output is guaranteed, as paid mediadelivers guaranteed impressions. With the new equations the outputcan be more variable – the upside can be significantly higher, but thereis a potential downside too. What if the equation ends up looking likethis?

Complete new equation (scenario 2):

Paid 75 + owned 15 + earned 5 = 75 impressions +0 conversations = 75

Or worse:

Complete new equation (scenario 3):

Paid 75 + owned 15 + earned 5= 75 impressions + −25 conversations = 50

Paid, Owned, Earned 11

In these equations the activity results in under-delivery, as the publicwere not interested in talking about or sharing the content or, in theworst-case scenario, consumers were moved to talk negatively aboutthe advertiser. (It’s not just about volume of buzz; it’s about volume ofpositive sentiment – it is unlikely that an increase in conversation willbe celebrated if it is all critical!)

When things go wrong the fault is most likely to lie with the insightand idea conception rather than the delivery. Real-time listening canhelp to amend or refocus campaigns that aren’t working as planned,but those who argue that, in time, earned media can completelyreplace paid media ignore the fact that production lines don’t stop andbusinesses cannot afford to be left with excesses of stock if acampaign doesn’t deliver.

Advertising and marketing are invariably used as a stimulant for sales,and the predictability inherent in paid media plans aids businessforecasting. Paid media offers guaranteed delivery of impressions (andsales), whereas even with the best owned and earned media planningand execution there is luck involved in instigating cascades, viral effectsand sharing. Invigorating earned media is a great way of deliveringadditional value, but the results can never be guaranteed, and advertisersneed to be wary of putting all their eggs in the earned basket.

Ideally, the three areas need to work side by side, but apportioningbudget between paid, owned and earned is difficult. The key to gettingthings right (or as right as possible) is therefore undertaking rigorousresearch and discovery in the planning stage, setting concreteobjectives, clearly defining ownership and roles, being adaptable asinitiatives progress, and then measuring and learning over time. In aworld where no one knows the (full) answers, a culture of testing andlearning will help to build up the knowledge base that will help predict,drive and refine efforts across paid, owned and earned. The equationsabove get easier to write and answer against this sort of backdrop!

Paid, Owned, Earned12

Aligning different stakeholders to deliver across paid,

owned, earned

Marketing across paid, owned, earned also travels across a number ofdisciplines and stakeholders, resulting in the need for significantlymore organizational alignment than in the old world. Differentdepartments, from website controllers, to PR people, to legaldepartments, to customer service departments and productdevelopment, need to work closely with media, public relations andcreative disciplines to ensure maximum returns. Success in one areapotentially amplifies the return in another, whilst negativity in one areacould lead to a lowering of effectiveness in another.

Departments that have traditionally been separate and working todifferent objectives now have to work together for the greater good,for example the customer service and support departments now havean important role to play in generating (positive) earned media. Sharingresults within an organization (between departments and acrossborders) is useful too. In an ever changing marketing world, knowledgeand experience provide an edge; shared learnings can therefore helpsuccessful activity and techniques to be scaled and underperformingoptions to be parked.

As Andrew Walmsley wrote in Marketing magazine: ‘Only brands thatcan fit the jigsaw puzzle together, creating a consistent presenceacross bought [paid], owned and earned media, can exploit thesynergies that lie between them... until marketers can control thesechannels in a unified way, customer journeys will be disrupted,inconsistent and often abandoned, costing revenue now and againstfuture relationships.’30

Paid, owned, earned is therefore not limited to the advertising ormarketing departments; it has implications for how things are done(and the associated organizational structures) across the company. This

Paid, Owned, Earned 13

may be a long-term consideration for many organizations, but thosethat have been able to adapt have been seeing positive results – we’lllook at social media governance and training in Chapter 9.

Most of all, though, working across paid, owned, earned is aboutconsistency and commitment. Campaigns that look to harness paid,owned and earned cannot be done piecemeal or half-heartedly. Themost successful activity has been built around strong, unifying ideasthat can work across all channels. Owned media promoted with paidmedia provides an essential base, and earned media (hopefully)delivers additional, bonus attention.

Paid, Owned, Earned14

Excerpt taken from Chapter 7: Broadcast

Twitter conversation driving TV

viewing

Another thought-provoking example came in February 2011 when HBOin the United States reran Howard Stern’s 1997 film Private Parts andHoward Stern himself decided to use Twitter to give a live, DVD-style,running commentary about the film to his Twitter followers.30 ‘PrivateParts’ became a Twitter Trending Topic and, rather than the TV contentsparking Twitter conversations, it was Howard Stern’s tweeting thatdrove the audience for the TV broadcast. Again viewers needed towatch it live or miss out on the chat, and one Twitter user summed itup when he simply tweeted ‘It’s 78 and sunny in LA but@HowardStern’s Private Parts Twitter commentary has me glued.Damn you Stern!’

Adam Bain, President of Advertising Sales at Twitter, also tweetedduring the live Howard Stern commentary, sending a call-out to TVbosses: ‘Every TV producer should be taking note of what@HowardStern is doing live w Private Parts+Twitter. He’s new butalready broken new ground.’ Howard Stern’s use of Twitter turned arerun of a 14-year-old film into must-see, event TV, with the TV audiencesignificantly boosted by the attention of Twitter users. This type of real-time conversation alongside TV content can work for brands too.Perhaps the most astute example of using social around the 2011Super Bowl TV advertising came from Amazon, a company that weren’teven on TV during the game!

Throughout Super Bowl 2011 the Amazon MP3 account on Twitter(@amazonmp3) tweeted live, telling 1.5 million followers the trackname and artist of the music that was being used in advertisementsand TV montages, including an Amazon MP3 download link for the

Paid, Owned, Earned 15

music being used. Before viewers could even ask themselves whatthe track was, @AmazonMP3 had tweeted the details of the song andgiven their followers the opportunity to make an instinctive purchase.31

Amazon were therefore using Twitter to provide a service,but also to drive sales.

Tom Cunniff wrote: ‘This may be the most spectacularly productiveuse of social media I have ever seen. Commercial break aftercommercial break, Amazon successfully converted a dozen or so$3million dollar TV buys for other brands into an engine for Amazon e-commerce.’32

Robin Sloan on the Twitter Media blog suggested that this sort of livetweeting ‘turns classic web search on its head by pre-emptivelyanswering viewers’ questions’, and further stated: ‘I think songs inSuper Bowl commercials are just the start, this is a technique that canbe bent towards plenty of other purposes.’

Instead of pursuing equally flighted bursts of frequency of threeactivity, paid media spend can now polarize around broadcast contentwhere the enjoyment comes from participating and watching it live orin real time. These are the programmes to target if we want tostimulate simultaneous social actions and generate conversations, thepeople’s network amplifying our message and delivering additionalimpacts accordingly.

Impactful mass media is still the fastest way of creating attention orconversation around our messages, and prominent paid mediapositioning can therefore give a significant boost to earned media. Thismay just be the echo of the paid media, rather than lasting advocacy,but it’s free coverage that can drive action (which may then havedeeper effects over the long term).

Paid, Owned, Earned16

Additional Resources

In the past this book would simply have been words on paper, but thistext exists as an e-book and a book in traditional format. Furthermore,whilst this book functions as a stand-alone text, each chapter can beread in isolation, and there is a list of key points at the end of each one.Finally, this book also acts as a starting point for further exploration, agateway to a range of supplementary content that has been createdonline to support the words you are about to read:

• www.paidownedearned.com – expands on some of thethemes within the book and also contains up-to-date thinkingand further content that didn’t fit in;

• www.delicious.com/paidownedearned – contains all thelinks referenced through the book, with everything taggedby category and chapter number;

• www.facebook.com/paidownedearned – a centre forlinks, new content and related discussion – please join me!

• www.youtube.com/paidownedearned – features anaggregation of all the videos referred to in the coming pages;

• www.slideshare.net/paidownedearned – holds aslideshow overview of the following pages and also hostsother related presentations;

• www.twitter.com/paidownedearned – will syndicate andaggregate relevant links and will also aim to expand on thethemes that follow.

PAID, OWNED, EARNEDoffers a framework that decodes the socially connected

media landscape and helps select the right marketing

options for now and the future.

PAID, OWNED, EARNED is publishing March 2012 worldwideISBN: 978-0-7494-6562-9E-book ISBN: 978-0-7494-6563-6Price: £19.99 • 296 pages • Paperbackwww.koganpage.com

Consumers can now create,consume and converse and thecomplexity of media that now seesmultiple channels accessedthrough multiple devices hascreated major challenges fortoday’s marketing and advertisingprofessionals.