'Earned media' isn't the marketing I know and understand

The job sounded great — a marketing position with the state tourism department.

State benefits for a job I could do indoors for which I was vaguely qualified. I am pretty sure those type of state employees no longer have to check in at an office since the pandemic. You work at home from your state-issued phone and return calls when you get around to it.

Just one problem — one of the main duties of this position is to accomplish something I don't understand and totally disagree with. A new marketing term called “earned media.”

I wanted to make sure I knew what the term really meant, because my marketing skills are pretty old school and I never took any classes in marketing when I was in college. It is defined on Wikipedia like this: Earned media (free media) refers to publicity gained through promotional efforts other than paid advertising, which refers to publicity gained through free advertising, or owned media, which refers to branding.

I stopped understanding when I read, “free advertising.”

The notion has been around forever but it didn't get a fancy name until the age of online marketing. Before that, in its most successful form it might have been known as a publicity stunt, because that's usually the only way it worked is if someone was doing a stunt, like sitting on a goalpost for publicity.

I spent my life as a newspaper editor/publisher throwing tons of potential “earned media” in the trash every year. There was no end to the wonderful products that needed me to donate some of my extra newspaper space to making the inventor rich. If it was a somewhat local pitch and didn't sound too crazy I might toss it to my advertising department to see if they believed in the product enough to actually market it in my newspaper.

These days I still get these come-ons, I guess from marketing experts being paid to pursue earned media wherever they can find it. Our business members will benefit greatly from having their message on our Chamber of Commerce website.

It amazes me that businesses (and apparently our state government too) are paying folks well to hustle up ways to get something for nothing. That also begs the question: If you're getting something for nothing, how much is it really worth in the first place?

At the risk of making my friends in higher ed who teach marketing even more upset with me, when will we finally quit devaluing our paid media? I guess with the exception of the Super Bowl commercials.

In an age where media has become more and more fragmented we constantly hear people bemoan the fact they didn't realize what was happening in their own back yard. We don't consume news media at all anymore and when we do we aren't willing to pay for it or to pay to advertise in it. I'm guilty myself to some degree but for the most part I'm a throwback because I have to have local and state news.

I guess since I'm not willing to go back to college to get a new age marketing degree, I'll have to pass on that job. It would be interesting to audit one of those classes on earned media, though I would probably get thrown out.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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