The value of earned media

Digital ubiquity and “advertising pollution” have set the scene for earned media to play a leading role in driving both creativity and effectiveness, says a new report.

Published by WARC Advisory and Edelman, the report examines the effectiveness of earned media and explores how the digitally driven cultural shift of the past two decades has fundamentally changed how earned media needs to be viewed as part of the marketing mix.

Earned media is a powerful vehicle for using creativity to connect brands to customers more impactfully, says the report, adding that marketers now need to rethink how they balance activity across earned, paid and owned approaches. 

One of the most significant findings is that culturally salient creative work outperforms nonculturally salient work in terms of profit, sales and market share, highlighting how earned media’s unique ability to connect at scale with cultural relevance drives brand fame. Culturally salient campaigns also make budgets go further.

The “halo effect” demonstrates how uplift in sales of one product from a brand also boosts demand for other products in its portfolio — with culturally salient campaigns driving “halo effects” 11 percentage points bigger than nonculturally salient campaigns.

Though more traditional media outlets such as TV still have significant value, the report says social media has overtaken paid search to become the world’s largest channel by adspend.

Global social media adspend is forecast to total $247.3bn in 2024, up 14.3% year on year, according to WARC Media analysis. The average time spent on social platforms has increased to more than 2½ hours a day (up by 50%) since 2014. In the same period, worldwide user numbers across social platforms have risen 169%.

Data analysis from WARC’s global rankings shows that the “best of the best” of the world’s top marketing campaigns, based on performance in the world’s most prestigious awards for creativity and effectiveness, overindex in their application of earned media approaches. PR value was a soft metric measured by 71% of the most awarded ideas for creativity and effectiveness compared with 29% for all awarded campaigns. That overindexing is mirrored in other tactics commonly associated with earned campaigns, including word-of-mouth and advocacy. 

The proliferation of low-quality advertising has contributed to communications “pollution”, making it harder for messages to achieve the attention needed for brands to grow. A majority of Americans, 63% of Gen Z in the UK and one-third of the global population now use ad blockers. This finding occurs across multiple channels, including podcasts and streaming, as well as live TV.

Exploiting the opportunity for “earned effectiveness” in an infinitely connected world involves leveraging the diversity of spaces where customers experience their lives. “The five Rs of earned” — reach, relevance, reputation, response and revenue — outline key objectives in earned campaigns, enabling brands to generate mass visibility and build higher levels of brand trust.

The report says marketers need to exploit earned media campaigns, particularly given the strong evidence for how earned media contributes to critical brand building and commercial metrics. However, despite the data showing how earned media contributes towards exceptional creative and effective results, the report finds that most brands are using it with diminished effect. It defines this gap as the “earned fallacy”, showing examples of earned-led campaigns that are at the top of WARC’s Creative Effectiveness Ladder, compared to the prevalence of earned media approaches used at the lower levels, despite evidence of the effectiveness of earned in the media mix.

A full copy of the white paper is available to download for a limited time here. 

The big take-out: Earned media is a top tactic to achieve cultural saliency and drive creative effectiveness.