From "Awareness Without Advertising. The Art & Science of Brand Advocacy."
Marketing savvy businesses and brands today use some form of “hybrid” advocacy. The issue is that they settle for a Prius-caliber media mix when they could be driving a Tesla for just a few pennies more. In Brand Advocacy we call this the PESO paradigm.
PESO stands for “paid, earned, shared, owned,” media and serves as a means of segmenting all marketing channels at a brand’s disposal into discrete groups. It allows us to look at our efforts through any one of these four lenses (paid, earned, shared, owned), to see if there are opportunities to integrate additional channels into our new or existing programs.
The model also allows us to make sense of and to organize the channels in which we are currently investing. Let’s break down what the individual channels mean:
Paid: Exchanging money for distribution, whether an ad or content
Earned: Trading valuable content for an established authority’s audience
Shared: Amplifying content through your own audience
Owned: Aggregating an audience that seeks you out for content and then distributing your content to that audience
Figure 10: The PESO Model. Source: Annenberg School of Communication 2017.
By organizing brand advocacy around this bigger picture, you can more fully exploit opportunities in a given timeframe—and balance out the strengths and weaknesses of each.
Figure 11: Chart source: Annenberg School of Communications. 2018 .
The above chart is important. It postulates that awareness can be generated through Earned, Owned and Shared media alone. While it does not call it out by name this is exactly what campaign-driven brand advocacy is. We won’t split hairs by calling out that owned media can work fast or that generating more of right content is ever wrong.
Great advocacy is simply too lively and surprising for that.
