Earned Media? You Get What You Pay For

Paid advertising is infinitely scalable but at a cost that advertisers increasingly seek to defray by accruing earned media impressions or interactions. Earned media is broadly defined as an exposure, view, or interaction with a commercial message via an impression that was not purchased by the advertiser. Engagement with a paid impression is a reward for good creativity and targeting but is not earned in this context. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all offer the opportunity to build communities around a brand and the notion of a 'soft opt-in' of followers, friends or subscribers creating a level of permission in marketing. This seems both desirable and straightforward. In Twitter's case the equation is simple to understand. If A follows B then all B's tweets find their way to the Twitter stream of A. There is no algorithmic filter. An advertiser tweets, its followers see that tweet (or more accurately have the opportunity to see if they see that part of their stream), the exposure is earned. An advertiser promotes a tweet, the media is paid. If the recipient re-tweets, views of the re-tweet are earned. This is not the case with Facebook, the Facebook news feed is algorithmically filtered for relevance. The more frequently A interacts with B, the more often B's posts will appear in A's news feed. Infrequent interactions mean infrequent exposure and, in some cases no exposure. Simply put, the value of a friend on Facebook diminishes or increases in relation to the frequency of engagement. In Facebook's case, therefore, earned media is restricted to the organic posts that make it through the algorithmic filter, the subsequent shares of those posts and the shares of posts that arrive in the news feed as paid impressions. Facebook's reach is massive and that has undoubted value, it's just not free and the earned to paid ratio is less than some marketers had hoped for yet it remains worth pursuing. YouTube is different again; any brand can post a video or create a channel on YouTube. On occasion a miracle may happen. The brand video, often fueled by the oxygen of a little paid media may go viral yielding a huge earned dividend on the paid investment. Inevitably this is the exception rather than the rule as someone once said 'like self-immolation it's hard to do more than once'. More often the vast majority of the views to brand videos are paid, with a single digit percentage of earned views accruing to the advertiser via shares. As an aside 'the brand video hit parades' that fill many a column inch around the world don't distinguish between paid and organic views. This is rather like a ranking of commercials by volume of GRPs and passing it off as a measure of popularity. For context the five most shared video ads of 2013 achieved a total of

18 million shares according to Business Insider. From number 1 to 5 these ads were made for: Dove Geico Evian K Mart Cornetto (a video made in Turkey) In advertising

18 million is a small number and these are the best of the best. The message to the advertiser is clear. Earned media is never enough. The degree to which ads are shared, used and engaged with is a helpful measure of their value and an important ingredient of the creative brief but not a replacement for advertising investment. This is a truth that has dogged every advertiser and agency from the beginning of internet time when we created web sites, celebrated our organic traffic and then turned resentfully to banner ads, Google and Yahoo to bring the eyeballs we craved as the next million web sites appeared. We learned that the more utility we created through commerce, service, high value information or entertainment the greater the organic return. We did exactly the same with our first Facebook Fan Pages, at first they came by themselves or from a prompt on TV or a shopping bag; then we had to buy friends (we've all done it) and now we pay to reach the friends we have already bought, albeit at a discount to buying new friends and strangers. And so it goes on. Today the story is repeating itself in the world of app development in which we have learned quickly that organic discovery is often ineffective and that a combination of paid promotion and usefulness are necessary nutrients on the path from install to persistent use. Paid, owned and earned is a well-worn (but not stupid) taxonomy of messaging but it is one that demands context. Unless you choose, with more or less justification, to place a massive multiple on the value of an organic like, view, interaction or share you will be faced with the crushing inevitably that while it may not be able to sing or dance; money talks. Zuckerberg's law of sharing can be paraphrased as people will share twice as much content as they did in the year prior it is likely that the percentage of that content that is created by brands will decrease over time. Some brand owners will have great success with some programs some of the time but it remains true that dogs bite men with greater frequency than men bite dogs. 管理新知 您可能感兴趣的文章 美国职场趋势关键词：可穿戴与共享经济 2015-11-05 7 warning signs a great employee’s about to quit 2015-04-03 What I Learned About Assessments From a Human Resources Technology Conference 2013-10-28 最近文章 因利益冲突，Facebook COO和Twitter CEO退出迪士尼董事会 2018年01月15日 沪调整城乡居民养老保险有关标准 24日前可就近办理 2018年01月13日 易车网任命总裁张序安为 CEO 李斌卸任 2018年01月12日 IBM：3万职位面临调整 1万人或被裁 2018年01月12日 2017年度职场出差行程调查，出差最多的居然是他们！！

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