Moving Beyond The PESO Model in Marketing

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Is PESO still the ideal marketing model?

PESO changed the game for marketers, but is it still the best way to do things nearly a decade later? Does marketing need to evolve? In this post we define PESO and its impact and provide a replacement that puts the consumer at the heart of marketing, instead of the channel.

What is the PESO model?

MARKETING
TERM
DEFINITION

PESO Model

An acronym for paid, earned, shared, and owned, PESO is a media channel classification paradigm used in marketing and communications. It helps marketers understand all of the options for advertising and marketing their offerings and narrative. PESO originated in the public relations industry before becoming the dominant strategy in modern marketing.

The PESO model presents a method for creating integrated, multi-channel digital marketing by taking content and distributing it across channels more holistically. It unifies cross-channel efforts to begin creating consistency.

Also, PESO removed the traditional marketing silos, finally placing advertising, PR, and more under the same roof, which made that consistency possible. 

The PESO model comprises the following media types:

Paid media

Paid media, which PESO leads with, is the parent category that includes paid, brand-controlled media channels — methods that place a brand message in exchange for money. It includes things like social media ads, television ads, boosted content, lead gen, and other paid media campaigns. 

Earned media

Earned media is coverage of a brand or organization by a credible, non-brand source like bloggers, journalists, and influencer marketing. Word-of-mouth, podcast appearances, investor relations, article placements, and media coverage fall under this category.

Shared media

Shared media is a large category that contains everything from community and partnerships to shared social media platforms, and distribution and promotion — things like social network content curation, reviews, charity sponsorships, and user-generated content (UGC).

Owned media

Owned media is the content and channels owned directly by a brand, published to brand controlled venues. It includes lead gen like email marketing, apps, webinars, video content, content marketing like blog posts, and all aspects of organic search engine optimization (SEO).

PESO model popularity and its benefits

PESO became extremely popular with the 2014 publication of Spin Sucks: Communication and Reputation Management in the Digital Age by Gini Dietrich. 

At the time, marketing operated in completely siloed ways. The difficulties of that approach are obvious, from lack of consistent messaging to the inability to be agile across channels. 

Marketing, PR, and other disciplines were similarly disconnected from one another. The philosophy of traditional marketing also still held sway, preventing better prioritization of marketing and PR efforts and other efficiencies.

Paving the way towards unified marketing

A panacea for marketing stagnation, the PESO model revolutionized and unified brand marketing efforts and provided the blueprints for operating in a multi-channel world. For a time.

The PESO model helped remove the hurdles that traditional marketing approaches unintentionally created. Marketing professionals knew all these disparate efforts were connected, but PESO systematized it and showed the linkages needed for omni-channel, integrated marketing. 

Seeing the whole picture let marketers view their efforts through paid, earned, shared, and owned perspectives, revealed channel integration opportunities, and made marketing spends less opaque and more understandable.

Problems with the PESO model

The disadvantages of the PESO model center around the fact that it prioritizes paid and focuses on channels over consumers.

However, content distribution is only half the battle. What about the audience? When it comes to understanding what your audience actually wants and satisfying them, PESO offers few answers.

PESO didn’t explain how to reach audiences with the right message at the right time. It didn’t consider the ways owned efforts could increase impact in non-owned channels. It didn’t solve the riddle of maximizing ROI, either.

In practice, PESO informed tactics do not create an infrastructure or a lasting method for capturing attention and fostering the trust brands need. They rely on marketing methods that are dollar in dollar out, efforts that stop the moment the brand isn’t paying. The PESO model encourages brands to exist across channels, but building the long-term credibility, authority, thought leadership, and trust brands need just doesn’t happen without a foundation of assets to capitalize on the attention and buzz created.

A modern alternative to the PESO model

The limitations of PESO — focusing on channels over what consumers actually want and need — are currently pulling down its utility and effectiveness. Every brand operates through the PESO lens, practices integrated marketing, and has a crystal clear channel understanding, but few brands truly center the consumer. 

Owned asset optimization (OAO) is a paradigm shift towards audience desire without ignoring the wins of PESO. Instead of prioritizing traditional marketing channels, OAO develops brand-controlled assets purpose-built to connect authentically, and over the long term, with consumers. It moves from interruptive strategies to reception marketing and puts assets, and consumer connection, at the center of the marketing universe.

Owned asset optimization isn’t just a distribution or marketing model — it’s a brand infrastructure project. It goes several steps further, in fact. OAO: 

• Puts the consumer at the center of the brand’s strategic marketing focus
• Understands and delivers what consumers actually want
• Builds an infrastructure of brand owned and controlled assets to keep delivering value

OAO vs. PESO

Assets vs. channels

OAO builds purpose-driven performance assets — brand-owned and controlled properties built to provide exactly what the audience wants in the long term — that aren’t channel-limited and don’t simply turn off when brands stop spending.

Investing vs. spending

OAO doesn’t talk in terms of allocating your marketing spend. It talks about cost-effective investment in the properties brands own, making them value-delivery machines, and ultimately, creating the priceless trust that traditional interruptive marketing distribution is failing to achieve.

Don’t forget your audience 

Putting your audience “first” requires the sophisticated consumer behavior insights only available through search engines. This “search intent data” is a massive, unfiltered, and honest collection of all Google searches that can be leveraged for audience alignment. OAO strategies build assets that match solutions with audience problems, then distribute those assets across the right channels, to find the right audience.  

The real customer journey

OAO acknowledges that consumers do not act in accordance with simplistic funnel stage models. It also doesn’t try to shoehorn consumers into that prescribed journey, instead building all the necessary touchpoints and being ready whenever and however the audience chooses to engage. OAO’s infrastructure is created with the non-linear buyer’s journey — how real people behave in the marketplace — in mind. 

Direct audience access, less gatekeepers

Brands that don’t just spend money on channel based marketing and work, instead, on developing their own powerful assets into in-house, controlled channels create opportunities for direct access to their audience. Using the properties your brand has full creative and technical control over, you gain unmitigated audience access and the power that comes with it.

Narrative control considered

PESO only partially addresses controllability. Control, in OAO, means that brands dictate their story, plot points, throughline, and positioning instead of third-parties and marketing channel gatekeepers. This control, combined with direct audience access, makes marketing content far more effective.

Return on investment addressed

While PESO maps out the channel and integration opportunities, OAO jumps ahead to address the question of maximizing ROI across all channels. Because OAO centers consumers, regardless of channel or funnel stage, it guides more aligned marketing content everywhere. Better audience alignment means higher engagement and ROI regardless of how the campaign is distributed.

OAO transcends PESO

When it comes down to a choice for marketers — the new way, with OAO, or the old way, with PESO — one achieves unified marketing and one unified the channels, one centers the needs of real people, one just shows you how to distribute marketing content. Which one are you picking? Here’s how they stack up:

OAO	PESO
Unifies digital marketing as a whole	Unifies the most common marketing channels into a broader communications strategy
Builds content around consumer needs	Builds content based on the channel
Guides your overall marketing strategy	Reveals distribution opportunities
Reveals what people want and how to satisfy them	Reveals integration opportunities
Builds venues you own and control to deliver long term value	De-silos PR and marketing, tying media relations and other forms of marketing together
Lifts ROI across all other marketing efforts and campaigns
Doesn’t rely on a pay-to-play model
Optimizes the customer journey and each touchpoint along the way
Brings transparency to the competitive landscape
Earns brand equity, trust, and achieves audience alignment
Builds brand awareness AND lead generation for full-funnel marketing
Ties universal ROI metrics to often hard to measure results

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