Time to Rethink 'Earned Media' in Marketing #DigitalSense #RedefiningMedia

The ability to 'earn media' and get free views on your advertising content was one of the great early promises of digital & certainly social marketing. Today there are vast resources, gurus, agencies & technologies dedicated to earning marketers the next big 'viral' hit, or helping increase their 'organic reach' by a few percentage points. In reality however the amount of additional media earned on a typical campaign is so small as to almost be a rounding error, whilst this focus obscures a much bigger marketing struggle: the battle for attention. We need to rethink earned media less in terms of extra eyeballs seeing our content and more in terms of getting the first set we've paid to reach actually paying attention to us.

It is of course a very attractive concept for us marketers to be able to make content so good that people want to share it with their friends, or so good that it rises above the rest of the noise surrounding it in a newsfeed. Who wouldn't want to aspire to that? We all know we need to reach people with our messages for them to have any impact at all, and with tight budgets the offer of being able to do that for free is irresistible, but are we just being sold snake oil?

There is an exception to every rule of course, but for every remarkable case of earned media attracting mass scale there'll be 99 cases where content has vanished without a trace. And most of the good examples will have had far more media put behind them than you like to believe. Earned media on digital is in fact typically lower than the amount of additional audience outside your target you get for free on TV, but for some reason we call that 'wastage' and never even talk about it.

Take Dove's famous 'Sketches' video for instance, often hailed as one of the early examples of a video which went viral globally. It's a great and powerful piece of storytelling content for sure, but did the Unilever team really just sit back and hope people shared it? The reality as I've heard it told is quite different - a sophisticated media operation where millions of dollars of paid support was nimbly switched around between key markets depending on how well the video was performing in each. Certainly it did get shared and earned new views, but that was far from a lucky coincidence, or the main driver.

Discussing organic reach on Facebook became pointless around 4 years ago when they launched products which let you broadcast to their entire user base, not just the handful of people who'd opted in. Still with a share button on every post surely earned media still plays a role here? Across almost any campaign with meaningful paid scale the earned percentage is in the (very) low single digits. There are some recent high profile examples of content earning huge reach with no media support (a certain Chewbacca wearing mum for instance) but the fact than this CAN happen doesn't negate the fact that for 999,999 other videos it didn't.

There's a case to be made that on YouTube this earned media rate can often be shown to be somewhat higher, perhaps as much as 20% with 50% not entirely impossible for a truly fantastic bit of content; but that's still 20-50% on top of what you buy, so if you don't put much media behind it to begin with it doesn't mean much. The most viewed YouTube ad of 2015 (for Clash of Clans) had over 80 million views but ‘only’ 1 million shares, about 1.25%. The most shared ad (for Android) had 6.4 million shares but 'only' 24 million views. You can argue that such a high share rate (27%) is in fact just indicative that not enough paid media was put behind it as you're still reaching your core, most passionate audience.

The same goes for Twitter which seems more prone to sharing, but even when the stars align around a viral moment like Oreo's 'Dunk in the Dark' the earned reach is far less than they'd just buy with media on a typical day today. Even social media influencers, seen as partners who can help you beat the system and earn media using their large audiences, almost always end up at higher effective CPMs than simply buying views. They're effective sources of great content that people are willing to watch, but it's no surprise their agents increasingly bundle their efforts in with media packages to drive real scale.

Whilst digital has empowered people to do everything it still motivates them to do nothing. There's a joke that the second page of Google search is the best place to hide a dead body, and indeed as functionality has pushed organic results down below the fold the SEO industry has discovered how little effort people really do put into finding the right thing to click. It's not the case that we have people's interest & attention by default, we have to earn that first before we can even think of them passing our content on, and that’s not easy.

On Facebook you can buy, or yes maybe earn, an impression in people's news feed but you can't force them to watch your video. On YouTube you typically can force people to watch a few seconds, but then they're totally free to skip the rest. 10 seconds into most videos on either platform and you've lost the majority of your audience, by 30 seconds you're often lucky to have a double digit percentage. The biggest 'earned media' opportunity in digital right now is the opportunity to earn those people's attention for more than the bare minimum of time.

In TV terms the channel isn't offering to show your 30 second ad again in another break for free (the traditional view of earned media), it's letting you buy a 5 second ad but keep showing it for 10, 30, 60, 90 seconds... However long people are interested. If you've never bought any TV let me assure you a 90 second ad costs A LOT more than a 10 second one does.

There's huge earned media value on the table here but it's not captured by shares or views, it's counted by view through rate: By studying in depth how many people are still watching your content after 10 seconds, after 30 seconds, at the very end; By looking in detail at what makes people drop off faster, or stick around longer; by not being afraid to re-edit your video, try different versions and upload them again. It's not a battle that's won with cute gimmicks and a simple formula, it's one you win with quality storytelling and a focus on the detail of your analytics. And guess what - if people do watch your video to the end they're far more likely to share it and earn you some media that way too.

Digital channels offer marketers a very rich opportunity to efficiently extend their reach, and I've seen many big companies make large changes to their media mix to take advantage of this. There is however a huge risk where brands are shifting their media but not adapting their content. If your brand doesn't feature in the first 5 seconds of your YouTube ad, then the vast majority of people seeing it won't know you've got anything to do with it. You can get VERY bad results by showing an awful lot of people something which, for what they see if it, makes no mention of your brand or messaging.

If you were buying a 5 second advert on TV you'd make sure your whole message was in it, so it's time to be more ruthless with digital. Of course there is then the option to draw people in and tell far longer & richer stories beyond that, so creatives shouldn't bemoan the practicalities, they should embrace the challenge. Not can you earn the right for people to love you so much that they pass you on, but start with can you earn the right that busy people bother enough to watch you at all?

As I've said previously content isn't King it's a democratically elected President, and it's a much better measure of an election campaign to see how many people are giving your candidate any attention at all, than it is to see how many highly active campaigners willing to actively pass on your message. The latter helps along the way, but they’re not the ones who cast the final votes.

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I am a marketer who helps global brands make sense of media in a digital world; Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. #DigitalSense is my attempt to cut through the hype that too often surrounds the industry. I am Digital Partner at Carat Global, an agency redefining how the world's biggest brands think about media, though these are my personal thoughts.