Paid, and Earned, and Owned! Oh, my!
It wasn’t long ago that public relations existed entirely in the “earned” media space, and the practice solely relied on traditional media relations to get information out about a brand. In this space, public relations professionals sent out news releases and hoped the information was newsworthy enough to be put into a story.
In this realm, the advertising department handled “paid” media placements, including ad buys, and the marketing department handled “owned” media, including websites.
Traditionally the lines between paid, earned and owned media were defined and distinct, yet their relationship was symbiotic in the nature of communication.
However, the once defined and distinct lines of paid, earned and owned media spaces have blurred with the emergence of digital and social media. Now, roles have begun to overlap.
As a result, the public relations industry has reached an inflection point. It’s now at a crossroads and must either adapt and carry on or die out in the digital space.
This is not where the story ends for the public relations practice. As an industry, the public relations field has significantly shifted within the past decade to adapt to new practices and standards in this constantly changing space.
One shifting practice is measurement. In the digital space, it is essential that public relations practitioners set their own standards of measurement to understand online return on investment, or ROI, in the digital space and to measure campaign success on a macro and micro level.
With new tools available for measuring audience behaviors and demographics, digital teams have begun to rely more on data and analytics to reach hyper-segmented audiences.
But as these measurement tools adapt, professionals need to adapt too.
“Measurement comes down to setting your own goals and making sure that there are benchmarks at the beginning and end of a campaign,” said Corianda Dimes, digital manager at Golin, a global, integrated public relations and marketing communications firm. “Depending on the sophistication of the tools available to you, that’s how you measure a campaign.”
Over the past decade, digital platforms have also served as an incubator for the growth of online social personalities — influencers. This new influencer space has created an overlap and convergence in the earned and owned media spaces.
Influencers are bloggers, YouTube and online personalities that get paid thousands of dollars to entertain and engage online users with niche content based on an influencer’s interests or personality.
The influencer space is an area where online personalities can go through their purchases during a shopping trip, or a “haul,” as they’re known on YouTube, and get millions of views. For example, Michelle Phan’s $20 Makeup Challenge Haul video has 3,204,040 views to date. If you account for an average of $2 per every 1,000 views, at the very lowest, Phan has most likely made about $6,400 on that video alone.
According to a Variety survey in August 2014, YouTube stars are more popular than mainstream celebrities among U.S. teens. The survey asked 1,500 respondents to assess how personalities compared to each other in several categories, including approachability, authenticity and other criteria. Online personalities were ranked higher than mainstream celebrities in almost every category.
Since influencers’ emergence into the spotlight on the digital landscape, many marketing and public relations professionals have grappled with the question of who owns the social influencer space and those relationships. Ultimately, these relationships have fallen into the laps of public relations and digital management professionals, who must adapt to understand the paid media landscape in a once-earned media space.
Social influencers have become such powerful figures in the online and off-line world, but what are they worth to brands? Guaranteed eyeballs and authentic partnerships.
In an increasingly competitive digital space, social influencers and sales professionals are constantly raising their prices for branded content and paid integrations, and public relations and digital professionals must be able to understand the return on investment in working with each. According to Dimes, some questions that are important to ask when moving forward with a paid integration are: What audiences will this reach, and how do these influencers engage with their audience? What will the influencer do to help increase the campaign’s reach?
Another category where traditional media areas are converging is in the earned and paid media spaces.
Traditionally, media and public relations lived together in a somewhat symbiotic relationship. Public relations practitioners once stood as gatekeepers for information, and journalists aimed to take down those gates through their work.
Social media, or what were once considered “free” platforms for companies to reach their consumers, has dramatically changed the relationship between the public relations practitioner and traditional media.
“With the emergence of social, brands began to look at these platforms as another PR tool that’s available to generate their own content before going out and buying an ad or reaching out to traditional media,” said Dimes.
Social and digital platforms have also given companies a space to pay for branded content via social and native advertisements. Paid opportunities have given brands an external push that it may need to get its content out the door, whether that means getting content in front of eyeballs through paid integrations, native advertising or social media.
But with these quickly emerging and increasingly expensive opportunities for brands, public relations practitioners are beginning to wonder: Who is governing this pay-for play world and how is it being regulated?
In some respects, individuals might look to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for guidelines in the paid space. While the FTC does govern the rules for disclosure and transparency, they do not govern how much an influencer or an outlet can ask to get paid for these integrations.
As the digital world continues to grow and as media spaces continue to converge, public relations and digital media professionals must keep an optimistic eye on the future.
For for Dimes, it’s an exciting time to be in social advertising. “The rich data that’s available is huge,” she said. “All of the same rules and values from other marketing areas apply to social. We have moved into this space where social media is asserting its force as a tool in the larger marketing mix.”
Where will social and digital move the needle next? Only time will tell.
