Why most marketing budgets are allocated wrong — and a tool to figure out yours.
In nearly every marketing organization, the same conversation comes up at budget time:
"How much should we spend on paid vs. earned vs. owned?"
And almost every team answers it the same way: by looking at last year's budget and adjusting at the margins. Paid creeps up because it's measurable. Earned gets underfunded because it's hard to attribute. Owned languishes because nobody owns it.
The numbers below are based on 2025–26 benchmarks across North American and Canadian brands. The tool that follows lets you stress-test your own mix. If you're a CMO, comms director, or content lead, this is the conversation worth having with your CFO.
The PESO model — Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned — has been the industry standard since Gini Dietrich introduced it in 2014. For simplicity, Shared has been collapsed into Earned here. The key insight: these aren't three flavours of the same thing. They behave like entirely different businesses.
Coverage you don't pay for. PR placements, organic social shares, reviews, word-of-mouth, unpaid creator mentions. Highest credibility, lowest control, hardest to scale.
Anything you write a cheque for: search ads, social ads, display, sponsorships, paid influencers, OOH, TV. Predictable, scalable, declining trust.
Assets you control completely. Website, blog, podcast, email list, branded YouTube, app. Slow to build, exponential when it works, lasts forever.
Earned media is paradoxically the most trusted and the most underfunded channel in the average marketing mix. Three numbers that should reshape any budget conversation:
Pick a preset that matches your business stage, or enter your own annual budget and drag the sliders. The tool calculates projected reach, trust score, and long-term equity — based on 2025–26 industry benchmarks. This is directional, not prescriptive. But it's a better starting point than copy-pasting last year.
Start with a preset. Adjust to taste.
Pulled from CMO Survey 2025, Gartner CMO Spend Survey, Statista, and Canadian eMarketer benchmarks. The "industry average" hides enormous variance — but these patterns are real.
These aren't novel insights — they're the ones that keep getting validated in benchmark study after benchmark study, and the ones most often ignored at budget meetings. None of this is rocket science. All of it gets dismissed in favour of last year's spreadsheet.
A paid ad disappears the moment you stop paying. A piece of owned content — an article, podcast episode, email, video — keeps working for years if it's good. Underfunding owned media is the most common, most expensive mistake brands make.
You don't "do earned" — you do owned media so good that earned happens. A great podcast generates press. A great report generates citations. If you have no earned, you don't have a PR problem. You have a content problem.
Paid media has a place — for launches, time-sensitive campaigns, and reaching audiences you can't reach organically. But the moment paid becomes 60%+ of your mix, you're a brand renting an audience, not building one. Rent is expensive.
Nielsen has measured this every year for a decade: peer recommendations and editorial coverage outperform paid ads on every meaningful brand metric. If you're choosing between $50K of paid impressions and $50K of credible content, choose the content.
A startup needs reach — lean paid. An established brand needs trust and equity — lean earned and owned. A non-profit needs both credibility and efficiency — lean earned and owned hard. Copying a competitor's mix is copying their problems.
Earned media is hard to attribute. Owned compounds invisibly. Brand equity moves slower than dashboards. The hardest-to-measure channels are often the most valuable. Don't let measurability be the only criterion for spend.
"Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action."
— Seth Godin, This Is Marketing (2018)