PESO Model
What Is The PESO Model?
The PESO Model is a framework that organizes every marketing channel into one of four categories:
- Paid: media a brand pays to place in front of an audience.
- Earned: coverage or mentions a brand doesn’t pay for and can’t fully control.
- Shared: content distributed through social platforms, built on engagement rather than ownership.
- Owned: channels a brand fully controls outright.
The model, developed by communications strategist Gini Dietrich, replaced the older “owned, earned, paid” shorthand by giving social media its own category instead of folding it into owned or earned.
Why Is The PESO Model Important?
Most channel strategies fail the same way: they lean hard on one category and treat the other three as afterthoughts. The PESO Model forces a strategy to account for all four, and more importantly, to see how they reinforce each other. A strong owned asset earns media coverage. That coverage gets shared. Paid spend can amplify what’s already resonating instead of trying to manufacture interest from nothing. In cybersecurity marketing, where trust builds slowly and across many touchpoints, a single-channel strategy rarely holds up.
Can You Use PESO Model In A Sentence, Please?
“We weren’t missing a channel, we were missing a PESO Model. Paid was carrying the entire strategy, and the other three categories were an afterthought.”
See Also: Paid Media, Earned Media, Shared Media, Owned Media