As social media and online PR play an increasingly important role for brands, the three main media types – paid, earned and owned – need to be reviewed and reevaluated on a frequent basis.

This is particularly important in today’s climate, where owned and earned media are gaining more prominence than paid, which dominated in the past. 

What is owned media?

Owned media consists of any web properties you are in full control of. These could be your websites, blogs, social media channels and even your mobile apps. 

The more owned media you have, the better your chance for a broader online presence, provided you look after and maintain each channel. Owned media is driven by your content strategy, which means it’s important to make it valuable, informative and engaging for your target audiences. 

In order to maximise the impact of your owned media, you need to promote your content and distribute it far and wide. This is where you might find paid media to be useful. 

What is paid media? 

Paid media is the advertising you pay for in order to drive traffic to your owned media. Whether you choose pay per click, display advertising, influencers, social media ads or something else, paid media provides a way to promote your content, which should lead to more exposure, reach and recognition for your brand or product. 

At PerformanceIN we produce regular articles on two of the most dominant forms of paid media: paid social and paid search.

The benefits of using paid media are the immediacy and scale this type of investment can have on your brand. It can be controlled and used as needed. A caveat is that paid media is arguably less credible than earned media…

What is earned media?

Earned media describes the non-paid publicity and exposure your brand has gained from audiences. This consists of all content and conversation around your product or brand, created outside of your owned channels.

Think mentions, shares and reviews across different platforms, which all come together to give you a boost in exposure.

Often a result of a well-managed owned and paid media strategy, earned media drives traffic and engagement for your brand, although the results are harder to measure. 

Earned media is also high in the credibility stakes, because it comes from users and unbiased parties, although a lack of control over what gets generated can also create issues when negative reactions get taken into account. 

Do I need all of these?

Individually, owned, paid and earned media are key to any content strategy. These three elements influence each other in different ways, and to truly make the most of them, it’s key to integrate two or more into your campaign.

Biddable media is any form of online media that is auctionable – in real time – and usually serves as the alternative to arranging and paying upfront for a tenancy or reservation. 

With the explosion of automated trading within the display marketplace and the continued growth of pay per click on search engines like Google, biddable media is big business and a cornerstone of performance marketing.

How does it work? 

In a typical transaction, media, or inventory, is traded on a per-action basis via a third-party ‘marketplace’, which may consist of multiple advertising networks working on behalf of advertisers and publishers.   

Bids are made automatically, based on live information around what buyers are willing to bid, so the whole process is virtually instantaneous. If a bid for inventory is won, the buyer’s ad will be displayed on the publisher’s site in real time. 

A key perk of using biddable media is that purchasing can be continually optimised based on the success or failure of placements. That means if a campaign is performing well, a higher bid can be placed to gain more exposure for the ad. 

Where can I access it? 

Biddable media is available within a number of online marketing channels, with a particularly strong presence in search and display advertising, although the nature of each channel means their uses are often very different.  

Google Adwords (paid search text ads) allowed some of the first examples of biddable media to enter online advertising, enabling companies to bid on keywords on a pay-per-click (PPC) payment model. 

The ranking of ads on Google’s search results page is determined by how much advertisers bid for the keywords which trigger them, and is based on the results of auctions that keywords initiate. 

Through the development of complex technology, such as demand-side platforms (DSPs, which you can read more about here), and using the same tags and conversion tracking that search uses, display is now a major area of biddable media. 

This reduces the high cost of going direct to a website to place an un-targeted ad, on a cost-per-mille (CPM) basis. Advertisers can instead place a cap on how much they are willing to pay, based on the returns generated and reported by tracking code, whether that’s impressions or click-throughs. 

The future of biddable

Biddable media is no longer exclusive to ‘traditional’ online advertising. Programmatic TV is on the rise, allowing advertisers to bid on live video inventory based on audience data gathered through device ID, cookies and IP addresses. You can read about Sky’s endeavours into this area here. 

Although advancements in online and data are making the process of bidding on media much more of a possibility within out-of home advertising, such as electronic billboards, the current lack of audience data, and inability to track ROI, represents a key barrier. 

Read more from our Basics series. 

Data is taking the marketing world by storm. Advertisers are demanding it, tech companies are marketing off it, and for good reason.

Building campaigns on presumptions and guesswork is becoming a less and less popular approach, with today’s marketers preferring to work off what they know about the people they’re selling to. Data from a variety of sources can be applied to marketing all the way up and down the funnel, with this categorised in three ways: first, second and third-party sources.

Let’s take a look at where you can get data to build your own campaigns.

First-party data

First-party data is by far your most cherished source of information given that it comes from within the company.

This includes information left by the people that visit your site, drop you emails, give you calls and engage with you across all of your social channels. In short, if you collect it, that’s data from a first-party source – ie yourself.

In marketing terms, a classic example of first-party data being acted on is the retargeted ads that contain images of products the user has looked at.

Well-equipped businesses will house their first-party data inside analytics, CRM and other tools, using it to power ad campaigns and generally inform what they send out to each person. 

Click here to see how Shop Direct doubled its sales by utilising its own first-party data. 

Second-party data

Second-party data is perhaps the lesser known of the three forms, mainly due to its place in the chain of importance. 

This is still owned – and technically ‘first party’ – but belonging to someone else. Think about the partners used by companies, whether they’re publishers or another party that acts on the behalf of the advertiser. Sharing this data can carry mutual benefits for each side – one supplying the audience, the other supplying the product and reward.

Second-party data also includes things you probably use everyday, like keyword search data or ‘signals’ on your customers picked up via an analytics tool.

Third-party data

If you’re getting data from a third party it’s likely that you are acquiring data from a source that collects it via a number of ways.

You may have heard rumours about some companies paying publishers to place pixels on their sites in order to glean information on the people that visit. Everything that’s collected will usually find its way into a data management platform (DMP), where the information is segmented and offered to anyone that wants a fresh list of prospects to target, invariably at a cost.

Whole businesses have been formed off the back of this model, and it’s not uncommon to see new advertisers taking to third parties in order to build their audiences quickly.

Want to see how all of this is being used? See the latest data-driven editorial.