Earned Press Essay for forth coming Sandra Moriarty Text Book

A Matter of Principle in Advertising (9th Edition) by Sandra Moriarty, Nancy D Mitchell and William D. Wells

Clarke Caywood Ph.D.,

Professor, Medill School, Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. He is author of  The Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Marketing Communications, 2012.

Ask advertising directors in a company or agency what profitable target media they have chosen for message delivery for their new corporate or product/service brand strategy. They will probably give a list of traditional mass media advertising vehicles.

Then ask the PR director in the same company or company PR agency what the targeted media will be for the same program. It will often be a list of news and feature story outlets in web social media or traditional print and broadcast .

In an integrated approach to media planning, the communication leaders should logically be targeting the same media to reach similar readers, viewers, and listeners. If not, the C-Suite—chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and chief marketing officer—in the client company would want to know why not.

These newer models of media planning seem to be aligned with the growth of the large holding companies that contain advertising, direct database marketing, e-commerce, public relations, and, now, media buying agencies where coordination and cross-functional planning are essential.

In the IMC program at Medill, we define integrated media planning as “coordinated research, planning, securing, and evaluation of all purchased and earned media.” Earned media

is used by marketing and PR practitioners to differentiate paid media about a product, service, or company (advertising, promotions, direct mail, Web ads, etc.) from positive or negative broadcast, print, and Internet media articles and simple mentions about the product, service, or company. The term earned  should beused to avoid the term free, which accurately suggests the company does not pay the media for the placement.  The term free also  does not address the fact that the publication of such stories requires hours of  billed effort or years of experience by PR professionals to persuade journalists to cover the product, service, or company for the benefit of their readers or viewers.

Just as selecting media for advertising has become a science and management art, the field of selection and analysis of earned media (including print, broadcast, tweets and blogs) for public relations is now more of a science. Today the existence of far richer database systems assists media managers who want to know which reporters, quoted experts, trade books, new publications, broadcasts, bloggers, and more are the most “profitable” targets for public relations messages. In other words, when we refer to media planning

, we mean coordinating and jointly planning the earned media of public relations along with advertising and other purchased media.

Using the new built-in media metric systems from research firms, PR directors can calculate return on investment on advertising versus PR. With PR, they can read and judge a range of positive, neutral, or negative messages, as well as share-of-mind measures of media impact, advertising equivalency estimates, and other effectiveness indicators (see Caywood, Chapter 3, 2012 Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Marketing Communications, 2012.

Now, when the chief marketing officer and other C-Suite officers ask the integrated agency directors of advertising, public relations, or IMC if the media are fully planned to reach targeted audiences, they can answer affirmatively.