PESO Model (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned Media)

The PESO model (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned media) is an integrated communications framework that classifies channels into four media types. Paid is exposure you buy — ads and sponsored placements. Earned is unpaid third-party attention — press coverage, reviews, word of mouth. Shared is the social layer — content passed person to person, community conversation, and the give-and-take of social platforms. Owned is the property you control — your website, blog, and email list. The acronym was first coined by the late measurement expert Don Bartholomew around 2010, and Gini Dietrich popularized the model through her Spin Sucks blog and her 2014 book, with its now-familiar four-circle diagram showing how the types overlap. Dietrich's firm later trademarked the PESO model. Its purpose is to break public relations and marketing out of silos and treat the four media types as one integrated whole.

The model matters because modern communications cut across the old boundaries between advertising, PR, social, and content, and PESO gives one map for all of them. Each type plays a distinct role — paid buys reach, earned lends credibility, shared spreads through communities, owned anchors the relationship — and the overlaps are where the value compounds. Owned content can be amplified with paid, earn coverage, and get shared; earned credibility can be captured into owned channels. By naming all four and showing how they intersect, PESO helps teams plan integrated programs rather than running disconnected campaigns. It is especially associated with public relations, where it reframed PR from earned-media-only into a discipline that works across all four types — which is part of why it caught on so widely.

The PESO model and the POEM model are the same core idea at different resolution. POEM has three categories — Paid, Owned, Earned. PESO adds a fourth by splitting Shared media out of Earned. In POEM, social sharing is folded into Earned (shares you did not pay for) or Owned (your own accounts); PESO argues that social behaves differently enough — partly earned, partly controlled, conversational, and central to how audiences discover and judge brands — to deserve its own box. That single addition is the whole difference. Promoting Shared to a named category forces teams to plan for social deliberately instead of leaving it buried inside Earned, which is why PESO became the dominant version as social grew.

Choosing between them is a question of how much social matters in your world and how much detail you want. If social conversation is a major, distinct way your audience finds and trusts you, PESO's separate Shared pillar gives you a sharper handle. If social is minor or you want the simplest possible map, POEM's three buckets are cleaner. The honest framing is that POEM is the older, simpler classification and PESO is the refinement that gave Shared its own role; neither is wrong. Many teams learn the trade-offs with POEM, then adopt PESO once social complexity earns the fourth box. The two should be cross-linked and chosen by need — PESO when the Shared layer is too important to leave folded into Earned.

Using PESO well means mapping your activity into all four types, then working the overlaps rather than the silos. Set a role and metrics for each pillar — paid on reach and cost, earned on coverage and sentiment, shared on engagement and amplification, owned on capture and direct relationship — and then design programs that cross them. A strong owned content piece can be amplified with paid, pitched for earned coverage, and built to be shared; earned and shared attention should be captured back into owned channels so it is not lost. The integrated view is the point: PESO is most valuable when the four types feed one another, not when each is run by a separate team chasing its own number.

The failures are running the four types as disconnected silos (the very thing PESO was built to cure), over-weighting paid because it is easy to buy, neglecting owned media so there is no durable base, and treating Shared as an afterthought when it is often where modern reach and trust are won. Teams also misuse PESO by adopting the diagram but not the integration — naming four pillars yet still running four disconnected programs. The discipline is to use the PESO model as an integrated map across paid, earned, shared, and owned media, wire the pillars to amplify one another, and reach for it over the simpler POEM model precisely when Shared media has become too important to leave folded into Earned.

The PESO model — Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned media — was coined by Don Bartholomew around 2010 and popularized by Gini Dietrich, who added the Shared category to the older three-part POEM classification.

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