‘Earned media’ is bad branding for good PR
Rochelle Burbury, principal of Third Avenue Group, wants to kill off one of the PR industry's favourite terms.
I’m just going to come out and say (actually, write) this – I can’t stand the term “earned media”. Coming from a PR person, shocking I know. It may be an unpopular opinion, however, there is method behind my disdain.
The term ‘earned media’ is emblematic of a PR industry that has become self-entangled in marketing-speak and corporate nonsense, and nor does it represent what goes into achieving coverage for your client.
Of course, this industry loves an acronym and ‘earned media’ fits neatly into how media exposure has now become defined – POEM (Paid, Owned, Earned Media) and the more recent PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned). Paid media I get – that’s called advertising; owned media – yep, that’s a company’s website or online newsletter; shared – of course, that’s social media, but ‘earned’? Nope. (Ironically, the PESO model is attributed to Gini Dietrich, founder of communications firm Arment Dietrich…through her PR blog Spin Sucks).
‘Earned media’ just feels self-congratulatory. ‘Gee we really earned that story in the AFR’ or ‘Our client really earned that media coverage’. It takes way more than just ‘earning’ media coverage and that’s where the PR industry is doing itself a disservice.
Rochelle Burbury
I can’t ever imagine a journalist saying: “I work for an earned media channel.” It reminds me of when I worked at Fairfax (RIP) during the Fred Hilmer era when he referred to journalists as ‘content providers’ working for ‘advertising platforms’. You can imagine how that went down…pretty much the same way as ‘earned media’ does today.
Even earned media’s origins are murky. Some desk research tells me that there was no single inventor (telling…) but that it became popularised in a Forrester Research report in 2009. From there, like many corporate nonsense terms, and as digital media and all its buzzwords took off, it became popularised in the trade press and even academic journals until it gained a life of its own. It stuck simply because it was memorable, not because it held any merit.
No wonder journalists – the people PRs are trying to convince to run this ‘earned media’ – don’t like it. And they don’t. They rightly see it as a marketing construct, manipulative, using them as a free advertising service, and blurring the lines between editorial and advertising. What ‘earned media’ implies is that media coverage is a commodity secured through clever PR efforts, rather than the result of independent editorial judgement.
It appears that ‘earned media’ was developed for marketers, so they could better explain to CFOs how it differed to advertising or social in a language they could understand, and so the PR industry could justify ROI. And, disturbingly, how earned media links nicely to the draconian Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) measure, which has, rightly, been denounced by the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC)’s Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles.
It is true that the lines between PR and advertising are blurring – witnessed by the rise of creative agencies whose clever creative idea becomes the basis for a PR stunt or event.
The fundamentals of PR, however, are still deeply rooted in achieving media coverage, which provides your client with the third-party endorsement and credibility that advertising and social can never achieve.
So let me cut to the chase. It’s not ‘earned media’, it’s media coverage, or even more simply, it’s a story, in the media.
There is no magic bullet for PRs when it comes to successfully pitching a story to a journalist and achieving the sort of media coverage the client expects. It takes many skills, including:
- Being able to drill down and challenge a client when they have an announcement or story to ensure it passes the ‘so what?’ and evidentiary test
- Being able to take the information and turn it into a pitch that will appeal to a journalist, so they (rightly) won’t think they are writing ‘fluff’
- Ensuring that your client will give an interesting and compelling interview to the journalist (this is harder than you think)
- Offering an exclusive story based on the above
- Understanding the media channel and journalist you are pitching to – their interests, their previous stories, the audience of the channel, what will pique the journalist’s attention, and their deadlines
- And, more importantly, it’s about relationships. Having a productive and respectful working relationship is a short cut to that journalist knowing you won’t be knocking at their door offering fluff. It’s about earning their respect (even if it’s sometimes grudging respect). Which is pretty much the opposite of what the overuse of the term ‘earned media’ does.
It takes hard work, a keen strategic mind, an understanding of being in someone else’s shoes, and not being afraid to challenge your client to achieve a better result or rejecting the PR idea altogether. In an industry obsessed with shortcuts and clever one-offs, it takes a lot of work, time, genuine curiosity, and bravery for us to achieve positive results. We haven’t ‘earned’ those results, we have worked hard to achieve them, because frankly, getting media coverage is still a critical part of our job.
‘Earned media’ is bad branding for what is good PR, and as a term, it simply doesn’t pass the pub test.
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