The Role of Paid, Earned, and Owned Media in Building Entertainment Brands: Reminding, Informing, and Enhancing Enjoyment

We study the role of paid (advertising) and earned (online and offline word-of-mouth) and with owned (e.g., visiting brand website) media in building entertainment brands. We develop a structural model of viewing behaviours and apply the model to a new television program setting using a data set that contains both viewing and stated expectations and experiences. We use  this model to not only assess the relative impact of paid, earned, and owned media, but also to distinguish multiple roles that they might play--reminding (i.e., activating memory), informing (i.e., learning about the quality of the program), or enhancing enjoyment (i.e., gaining additional utility from socializing about the program). We present descriptive analyses and results from our structural model, which indicate that paid and earned media effects are relatively small and that owned media has a negligible effect. The effects primarily operate through reminding, but earned media plays a small, yet statistically significant enhancing enjoyment role. Information about the show comes primarily from watching episodes. Our results imply that the average effect of paid media is larger than that of earned and owned media, but that if earned media strategies can expand the proportion of frequent socializers, it can have a profound effect on viewership.