There’s been some buzz going around about Fred Wilson‘s AdAge Digital 2009 Keynote, in which he outlined a future where “Earned Media” grew and stole market share from “Paid Media.” Essentially the idea that companies would engage more in conversational marketing and less in advertising.
We’re big fans of the rise of Earned Media, and how it can be used to maximize benefit when coupled with a Paid Media campaign, and we’ve written a great article about the convergence of Paid Media and Earned Media over on MediaPost’s Video Insider.
The crux of our argument is that Paid Media and Earned Media are two tactics of the same strategy — here’s our thesis:
In the case of viral video campaigns, you have one firm that handles all of the media distribution, strategically using both earned media and paid media as different tactics to generate as much attention as possible out of the budget available. Video marketers are familiar with this reality, but there’s no reason to think that this trend won’t transform media other than video, assuming that agencies involved build creative campaigns that offer true value to participants.
Arguably, earned media and paid media together will strengthen marketing campaigns more than when practiced separately. As such, agencies and media professionals shouldn’t put themselves in a box and narrowly specialize in one or the other. Ultimately, we’ll have to be well versed in a unified media strategy and utilize a different mix of tactics per-campaign in order to meet our clients’ needs.
What do you think, is specialization a bad idea or do we need people well-verse and focused on narrow expanses of the digital range?
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