Forget bought, owned and earned media - what about the audience?!
By Matt Rebeiro March 25th, 2009
In Media · Social media
I’ve been wrestling with Leo’s recent thoughts on bought, owned and earned media. In so doing i’ve come to a new epiphany that has altogether more to do with how these three categorisations (bought, owned and earned) apply to audiences.
Consider this; one can buy an audience - for example buying an email list. One can also already own an audience - for example those people who have signed up to an RSS feed or email list. Moreover, in social media (specifically) one can earn an audience - for example a brand’s content ‘goes viral’ and earns a large(r) audience.
Just a thought…
1 Daniel Goodall // Apr 20, 2009 at 8:09 am
Hmmm… I don’t think it’s a good idea to think of “owning” an audience.
I think it is much healthier to think about continually Earning your audience and their attention.
You’ve Earned the RSS audience, and they can just as easily unsubscribe.
If you consider them “Owned”, I suspect you will mistreat them and their attention will soon head elsewhere…
2 Matt Rebeiro // Apr 20, 2009 at 11:46 am
Hi Daniel,
I agree that it can be dangerous to think of owning an audience. Perhaps we should think of them as the ‘existing audience’. A brand can own an audience, but that is the wrong way to think about it; as you point out, an audience can very well bugger off if you do something to irk them (such as assuming their loyalty without giving them good reason to be loyal), so perhaps ‘existing’ is a safer way to term this most important of audience groups.
Thinking of the ‘owned’ audience as the existing audience feeds nicely in to the real meat of what we’re interested here: earning an audience (as you say in your post, “this is where the action is”!). A brand’s existing audience is the group a brand can and should leverage to earn a new or bigger audience. If you keep your existing audience happy they will tell their friends and as we know, a recommendation from a friend is the most powerful form of marketing. Keeping your existing audience happy is the best way to earning more audience.
So yes, to think of a brands existing audience as ‘owned’ is foolish as it can lead to taking them for granted which will ruin the chance of leveraging the existing audience to help the brand earn new or bigger audiences.
3 Daniel Goodall // Apr 20, 2009 at 8:31 pm
So it would be….
Existing Audience: messages and activities for our existing customers or a database we have built up (earned?) over time.
Earned Audience: new people attracted by our activities, often informed via our Existing Audience.
Bought Audience: people we randomly shout at.
I’m sure you guys can think of a clever acronym.
4 Daniel Goodall // Apr 20, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Maybe “Buzz marketing is all about BEE”
… Maybe I’ll just leave the acronyms to the professionals ;)