What counts as earned media
Earned media is the coverage you didn't buy and don't own. A customer posts an unprompted TikTok about your serum, a newsletter mentions your launch, a Reddit thread recommends your app. You earned the attention with the product, the story, or the relationship, not with a media budget.
It sits alongside paid media (ads you buy) and owned media (channels you control, like your site, email list, and social accounts). Most creator campaigns touch all three, which is why the boundaries matter for reporting.
Where creator content blurs the line
A creator who buys your product and posts about it is earned media. A creator you pay to make a video is not, even if the video looks organic. If you gift product with no obligation to post and the creator posts anyway, most teams still count it as earned, though the FTC expects a disclosure once there's any material connection.
Paid UGC is a separate bucket. You're buying assets to run in your own ads or on your own channels, so it lands under paid or owned depending on where you use it. Keep the label honest in your reporting; mixing paid creator posts into an earned-media number inflates a metric that's supposed to measure organic pull.
How brands use earned media in creator campaigns
The practical play is to turn earned mentions into inputs. When a customer posts a strong review video, ask for usage rights and run it as an ad. When a creator organically mentions you, that's a warm sourcing lead: they already like the product, so the outreach for a paid deal is short.
Example outreach line: "Saw your Reel on our lip mask last week. We'd love to license it for paid social and talk about two more videos this quarter. What are your rates?" That converts a free mention into a repeatable content source.
Track earned media with a simple log: link, platform, date, estimated reach, and whether you followed up. It won't be precise, but it tells you which products and hooks people talk about without being paid, which is useful signal for the next campaign brief.
How it's used
Our Q3 report splits results into paid, owned, and earned media, and the earned column is mostly unprompted TikToks from customers.
That creator's post was earned media, so let's ask for usage rights before we treat it as an ad.