Online Marketing has, for a number of years, categorized their digital media / publishing options into 3 main types or channels. According to Forrester, Nokia was actually a pioneer of this and my former colleague Dan Goodall wrote on the subject back in 2009.
Owned Media
This is where you own the channel – think of it as your Dotcom. You have full control of what content and messages you want to put across to your customers.
Bought Media (a.k.a. Paid Media)
Simply put this is advertising. You pay for it. Think of banner ads or sponsored links in search results; affiliate marketing; the adverts you see everyday in your news feeds in Facebook or your newspaper for that matter. It can also include paid bloggers.
Earned Media
To paraphrase Dan’s post, this is where someone (brand or company) does something cool and people want to talk about it. The consumer becomes the channel.
Converged Media
Join it altogether and you have converged media. A great report from Altimeter, by Rebecca Lieb and Jeremiah Owyang, in 2012 illustrated very simply how all these media channels overlapped.
Challengers to this model
From my time directly involved in marketing up until the time I moved into another online space, there was much talk of a new model. One that essentially split earned media into two.
Earned media was to be deemed as coverage that you receive from PR and the advocacy and reputation that you build online, through blogs for example.
Shared Media
Shared Media was the new channel, composed of solely publicity, virality and sharing of content out with your control. Absolutely anyone can do it. Sharing on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, +1 on Google+.
What do you think? Are you using this model already?
References and further reading
- Altimeter SlideShare presentation
- POEM or BEOS
- The difference between paid, owned and earned media – 5 viewpoints (I love this site)