The following essay was featured in Campaign Magazine’s annual Power Essays supplement here in the Middle East. Excuse the lack of hyperlinks, but it was written for analog media 
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Throughout the last 12 years on the client side of things, I’ve always been amazed at how many companies outsource their “soul” by assigning critical customer facing tasks to external agencies and consultants. Customer service and call centers are operated by external providers with heavy cost reduction pressure on them. Social media presences are managed by social media agencies because brands are afraid they don’t understand the “social space”. Creative agencies are used on a case-by-case basis to communicate (and often dictate) the brand essence of the company. SEO & SEM tasks are outsourced to media or specialist agencies with no client interest of delving into the topic. The list goes on…
This needs to change. The Internet has brought along some major disruptions to the media landscape, along with it a fundamental shift in control. Brands are no longer able to control the message across the touch points, but rather live in a scenario in which the brand perception is a hybrid between company and customer perspectives. Customers are more in charge than ever before and the traditional media landscape (as it used to stand) simply no longer exists. Before the Internet, mass media dominated the audiences. This led to corporate ways of working in which the brand used mass media to broadcast its message and the “conversations” were outsourced to agencies behind a phone line or repair centre to deal with. In today’s time and age, these “conversations” and their amplification possibility has caused this shift in control. It is now more important than ever, to engage in these conversations, co-create value with customers and fuel your brand presence through advocacy, not mass communication.
In marketing and advertising, the old broadcast paradigm still seems to hold many corporations down. Most of the marketing budgets are placed on bought media and the conversational marketing costs are always questioned. Mass media still prevails, merely because of engrained habits, but also due to the same paradox in which brands outsource their souls by replacing time with money. In today’s time and age, time cannot be replaced in the manner it was replaced during the “mad men” times. Time is the “new money” as brands need to take the responsibility and accountability of interacting with its customers. Social media and community managers are often the core voice of the company towards customers. Call and customer service centres are not merely “cost centres”, they can become significant profit centres when positioned and managed properly.
Advertising is also evolving. Going from seasonal campaigns only, into continuous engagement and “always on” marketing efforts, allows brands to deepen their relationships with customers. These kinds of changes require brands to rethink their strategies but also their budgets. The notion of human media becomes a cornerstone of an engagement platform. Instead of funnelling money to outside agencies and bought media, brands should first look at investing the proper amounts of resources to handle their customer facing engagement roles. Once these roles exists, brands will get much more mileage from the creative and media agencies as the same co-creation principle applies just as much in a client – agency relationship, as it does with end customers. This calls for brave CMO’s and marketing managers.
Why is it so easy for brands to invest hundreds of thousands of Dirham’s into TV advertising, while hiring a few full time social media managers seems to require more approvals, amendments and bureaucracy than passing a new law in the UN? The reason is simple. In most companies, human media is still perceived as a non-working cost from a financial perspective. Marketing headcounts are kept low, because most of the actual work is done by agencies and over 70% of the budgets go to bought media on various channels (aka working media). With the emergence of digital channels, all of this has changed. 70% of your budgets should not be going into bought media alone. By investing more time and money into your creative/brand, you ensure you give your brand presence a continuous voice. Hiring internal resources to manage your “always on” performance media and social presences, is just as much working media, than buying TV spots. By having this human media inside your organization, you ensure that you have accountability as well as a proper workflow of knowledge gathering and sharing. Continuous engagement strategies stride on co-created value with the customers. Co-created value fuels advocacy and advocacy fuels positive WOM or earned media. This is like steroids for any brand.
The marketing organization of the future is one that understands the importance of its human media as well as the importance of cultivating conversations with customers. In-house conversational marketing teams will become more and more popular as they end up driving cost efficiency as well as a whole new degree of accountability and customer engagement. External resources are not seen as agencies, but rather soul mates. With the digital revolution that the Internet has provided us, customer-facing roles and channels have grown and the need for continuous dialogue, interaction and engagement become a standard part of how brands interact in this space. Customer engagement is much more conversation driven, in which dialogue and engagement begins to provide a shift away from a bought media and broadcast driven marketing alone. Internal creative agencies, customer service centres, community managers and brand architect’s begin to drive a fundamental transformation in the industry. An industry fuelled by your soul: the human media. Don’t outsource your soul.
Own, bought & earned media evolves
06/02/2011
The definition “own, bought and earned media” has become a popular description for the different media “types” that brands operate in as well as deal with. This terminology originated from within Nokia and quickly started to pick up pace across the industry. It did a great job in illustrating the emergence and importance of brand properties that resided within as well as outside the control of the company. This form of thinking has large implications on how brands need to revisit their media mix as well as their overall planning and budgeting logic.
As the digital landscape continues to shape the way consumers and brands interact, a further evolution of this “media trinity” might be welcomed. Own/Bought/Earned (OBE) gives a good overview, but there are a few dimensions that perhaps need to be called out more prominently in order to bring a holistic view to the picture. McKinsley recently took a stab at this by introducing “sold” & “hijacked” media into the mix. I’ve been working on something similar during the last few years, with one important additional “enabler dimension” i think the McKinsey model fails to point out. Human.
OBE evolves
OWN media.
Own media is the foundation of any brand. One could say that it consists of all the outlets a brand has in its control. These extend across multiple online properties, (both fixed and mobile) as well as different functional presences related to care, sales, comms/pr, marketing as well as human resources. In addition to digital channels, own media extends to physical spaces such as retail and care outlets as well as the product a brand itself is selling.
BOUGHT media
Bought media is quite self explanatory and consists of the presences/visibility a brand acquires through monetary exchanges with the media owners. These range across digital and physical spaces and are unified by the same principle: a brand pays (or bids) for having their product or marketing message displayed across a particular advertising real estate.
EARNED media
Earned media is a consequence of what a brand does, not something that a brand can buy or control. It is fueled by consumer satisfaction and advocacy, thus becoming a powerful vehicle to those brands that have earned their space in their advocate’s hearts. The biggest misconception I often run into, is that many marketers interpret earned media as having a Facebook page. A Facebook presence is own media, just as their .com or .mobi corporate sites are. Earned media is unprompted and driven entirely by sources that are not controlled by the brand. Brands can facilitate the dissemination of content by creating social features to their own media as well as engaging in conversations with its customers, but in the end, earned media is an end result delivered by the customer.
BURNED media
Just as great brands strive on the earned customer advocacy, modern digital channels make it increasingly easier for consumers to voice their negative brand experiences. Burned media consists of consumers that are voicing their frustrations about a bad experience they have had with a brand. This is also a consequence of what a brand does, not something a brand can pay to avoid. In this light, it becomes increasingly important to have the care and PR teams involved in crafting overall engagement strategies as well as frameworks that enable brands to quickly react to negative WOM as well as proper empowerment that enables community managers and care agents to solve any issues that are emerging.
TRADED media
In today’s age of collaboration, it becomes more and more evident that brands cannot do everything on their own. Collaboration amongst brands is needed and healthy ecosystems encourage a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality. Many brands fail to leverage the value of their own media and go out paying for media, when they could achieve more through clever partnerships where media is traded, or by allowing 3rd parties with no conflicting interests to buy real estate on the brands own web sites.
HUMAN media
Perhaps the biggest media evolution we have witnessed in the past years, has been the shift from broadcast media to conversational media. Along this chain of thought, a fundamental piece must also evolve. Conversations cannot be automated, they need a human interface that can understand the human emotions as well as cultural contexts that a particular engagement unfolds around. The earned and burned media streams unfold around conversations that need human interpretation as well as interaction to solve. The media mix that a brand evaluates, needs to start taking the core asset of any company = the people, into account. In the past, media was paid. In today’s world, it’s a combination of time and money, controlled and non-controlled spaces as well as an industry that’s still trying to find the right balance for shifting budgets (and people) accordingly.
