Blurring Media Categories
As a marketer, you place digital media in three distinct categories:
- Paid: Traditional ads that require a media buy
- Owned: Content created by your company
- Earned: Press coverage and user-generated content
Increasingly, however, customers ignore such distinctions. They're looking for the "right" media, and they tend to find it in a converged center—where categories intersect.
Success in this converged environment requires consistency across all media. And research by the Altimeter Group suggests that most of us aren't there yet.
"Paid, owned, and earned integration is in a state of early maturity across the ecosystem," write Rebecca Lieb and Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group in their just-released report titled "The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Will Combine Paid, Owned and Earned
Media."