Have you heard of POEM? Spoiler alert: we are not talking about literature here! Indeed, POEM is short for Paid, Owned and Earned Media. In this article, we delve into these concepts. Read on to gather insights on how to integrate them into your communication strategies effectively.

Paid, Owned, Earned Media: What Are They?

Paid

An advertisement in a magazine, a sponsored web article, a TV commercial, or a paid influencer partnership… As the name suggests, this category includes the visibility you have purchased!

These tools offer the advantage of defining your target audience in advance and getting an estimate of the reach of your content before investing. Whether you want to extend your brand’s current audience or position yourself in a new market, advertising is an amplification tool for your campaigns that remains effective despite an increasing preference among users for organic content.

Owned

This refers to content published in your name, particularly through your official social media accounts, blog articles, your brand magazine…

Owned media is essential: it offers a window into your brand. This type of communication allows you to address your audience on your own terms and control the storytelling associated with your products or services. It is also an excellent way of interacting directly with your customers while attracting new targets.

Earned

Press articles, social media posts, and other content related to your brand that you have neither paid for nor published yourself fall under earned media.

From your followers posting photos of your products to journalists writing articles about your brand, all contribute to your organic visibility. They bring authenticity, if not lasting legitimacy, to your brand. Consider the milestone that an Instagram post by a celebrity or an article in Vogue represents for a young designer.

In short, as the name suggests, earned media is the visibility you earn from your hard work!

Which one to choose for your communication strategy?

Now that we have defined these concepts, what is next?

Knowing these terms provides you with a framework for understanding your media impact.

Although paid, owned, and earned media are complementary, you will need to balance these different levers. Is it more interesting to use a macro-influencer? Strengthen your press relations team? Or produce a new photoshoot? In other words, how do you allocate your budget between paid, owned and earned media?

To answer these questions and design strategies suited to your current goals, you will need to understand the impact of your communication actions.

Therefore, it is essential to adopt a 360° vision and identify the capacity of each of these levers to help you achieve your goals.

How to measure their impact?

You might be already assessing the impact of your social media posts and influencer campaigns. But did you know you could integrate earned media into your analyses as well?

What engagement did our last influencer activation generate? Is their reach similar to the latest posts from our own accounts? Which of our products are most covered by the press?

Here are many questions, whose answers will allow you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy, redirect it as needed, and design the next ones based on reliable data.

Estimation Média offers comprehensive 360-degree media monitoring and provides tailored analyses of your brand’s press, web, audiovisual, and social media visibility. Specializing in both French and international media, our knowledge of the sector’s KPIs and of monetary valuation concepts like AVE and EMV allows you to accurately estimate the return on investment of your communication strategies and obtain the critical data needed for informed decision-making.

To learn more, visit our contact page.

AVE, EMV, what is it?

A.V.E. stands for Advertising Value Equivalency and corresponds to a monetary value calculated from the advertising rates of a medium. This refers to the occupation of a space, a surface, a time slot… In a nutshell, it is the budget you would have spent through advertising.

E.M.V., for Earned Media Value, also aims to give a monetary value to earned media. However, it is based on a different calculation method.

To evaluate it, several parameters are integrated:

– Reach; Based on an estimate of unique impressions, this indicator corresponds to a reduced percentage of the audience (i.e., most often, the number of followers). As each algorithm has its own specificities, this percentage varies according to the distribution platform and the type of publication. It aims to give a figure that is representative of the reality of the number of people reached by the content.

– Engagements; Understand the number of likes, comments, shares and any other interaction with the content…

Estimation Media uses the Ayzenberg method to calculate EMV. This means that each person reached and each type of engagement is assigned a fixed monetary value that varies by platform and type of publication. For example, the view of an Instagram story is not worth the view of a YouTube video.

Which method to choose?

As you can see, these indicators are two different valuation methods, each with its own advantages and limitations.

The AVE is ideal for measuring your ROI. To do this, you simply value your earned media and relate it to the amount invested to obtain it. Keep in mind, however, that an organic article will always have an intrinsic value that distinguishes it from advertising!

However, it is difficult to apply the AVE principle to social networks. Indeed, even if most media offer rates for the diffusion of posts or stories via their account, prices are more variable on the influence side. It would be a shame to exclude the impact of nano-influencers on the grounds that they do not offer advertising rates.

For this reason, Media Estimation uses the AVE method to value press, web-editorial and audiovisual content, and the EMV method for social network content.

What are the limits of this practice?

Although EMV is a popular way of valuing social networks, it must be handled with care: depending on the platforms and social listening tools, the percentages and fixed monetary values applied may differ, thus making the results vary. To overcome this problem, Estimation Media centralises data from different platforms in order to offer you consolidated results at 360°.

Finally, the MVE is to be considered as a “super-indicator” aggregating many different KPIs. This represents an opportunity for marketers: to visualise at a glance the global results of a campaign or an influencer, and to compare them with their own campaigns and those of their competitors.

However, the use of EMV must be complemented by other indicators in order to evaluate the impact of a strategy, to identify the success factors and weak signals. Did my campaign have more reach than the competition? How was the content received?

Estimation Média carries out 360° tailor-made media studies. We specialise in decoding your visibility, measuring your performance through AVE, EMV and many other KPIs and qualitative data that will provide you with a detailed and multidimensional analysis of your impact.

For more information, please visit our contact page.