Paid, owned, earned
Marketers sort channels into three buckets. Paid media is reach you buy: ad auctions, sponsorships, whitelisted creator posts. Owned media is what you control: your site, email list, your own social accounts. Earned media is attention you didn't pay for or control: press, organic shares, customers posting about you.
The buckets overlap in practice. A creator video is earned when the creator posts it unpaid, owned when you post it on your account, and paid when you run it as an ad. The same file can move through all three.
Why UGC changed paid media
Paid social used to run on polished studio creative. On TikTok and Meta feeds, that style now reads as an ad and gets skipped. Creator-made video shot on a phone blends into the feed, which is why most DTC media buyers now fill a large share of their ad accounts with UGC ads.
The operational consequence is that paid media teams have become creative buyers. A media buyer who used to request one hero video a quarter now needs a steady stream of 15 to 30 second creator clips to feed creative testing. That's what pushed creator sourcing from a brand-marketing task into a performance-marketing task.
What to secure before a creator video goes into paid
Two things. First, usage rights: the agreement must say the brand can run the content as paid ads, on which platforms, and for how long. Organic-only rights don't cover ad spend. Second, the right file: vertical 9:16, no platform watermark, no licensed music, ideally with the raw footage so your editor can cut variations.
A typical paid-media brief line: three 20 to 30 second UGC videos per creator, delivered as clean 9:16 files plus raw clips, 6 months paid usage on Meta and TikTok, spark ad authorization included. Budget the fee with that usage in mind; it costs more than a single organic post and should.
How it's used
Media buyer to founder: "Paid media is 70 percent of our new-customer volume, and most of the winning ads are creator clips we bought usage for."
Brief note: "This content is for paid media only, so we need ad usage rights and the unwatermarked file, not a post on the creator's account."