Media types

PESO model

paid earned shared owned · PESO

Definition

PESO model is Gini Dietrich’s four-bucket map of media a communications program can use: paid, earned, shared, and owned. The point of the model is integration. A program that only buys ads, only pitches reporters, only posts on social, or only publishes on its own site is running one letter of the acronym.

Dietrich used the process inside her agency before naming it in Spin Sucks (2014). Earlier marketing writing already split paid, owned, and earned. PESO adds shared as its own letter so social circulation is not stuffed into earned by default. Later refreshes put reputation in the center and spelled out overlaps: media relations sits between paid and earned when an influencer deal is involved; SEO sits between earned and owned when a journalist’s link points at a page the brand controls.

How it works

Sort every tactic before you brief it. If money changes hands for the placement, it is paid. If a third party publishes without a fee, it is earned. If the brand controls the URL or the account settings, it is owned. If the value is other people passing the message through networks they control, it is shared. Many artifacts sit on a line. A contributed article on a trade site is earned in the assignment and owned in the draft the author still controls. A boosted LinkedIn post is owned content running as paid media.

Example: a climate-tech company publishes a methods page (owned), pitches the underlying dataset to two energy reporters (earned), posts the charts on LinkedIn where employees and customers comment (shared), and spends $4,000 promoting the employee post to a policy-staff audience (paid). The report should not collapse those four rows into “a PR campaign.” The owned page is what the links and the models can cite. The earned stories are the independent check. The shared comments are proof of circulation. The paid spend only amplified what already existed.

How it differs

Paid / owned / earned without the S treats social as either a company channel (owned) or word of mouth (earned). PESO forces the team to say which. Digital PR is not a fifth letter. It is mostly earned work aimed at owned URLs, with shared and paid used to extend a story that already cleared an editor. The model is a sorting tray, not a maturity score. You can run a clean PESO map and still miss the only ten journalists who cover the category.

Common errors

Filing sponsored content under earned because it “looks like an article.” Filing the company blog under earned because “people might share it.” Using PESO as a slide title with no inventory of actual tactics. Treating the 2020 graphic as a measurement system. It is not. Barcelona Principles cover evaluation; PESO covers channel type.

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