WHY WE NEED A NEW APPROACH TO EARNED MEDIA

Earned media has always been harder to win than paid or owned. It depends on third-party recognition, not media spend or channel control. But in the last few years it’s become even more challenging.  Part of the reason for this is volume; more brands are competing for the same limited attention. Part of it is fragmentation.

In their Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2025 report, Reuters describes a media environment where audiences are pinballing between platforms, while creators, influencers and alternative voices are taking a bigger share of attention. The same report shows that online news is increasingly discovered through platforms rather than by going direct to publisher sites, with video-led platforms central to the shift.

As more people find news through social platforms, the definition of a publisher is widening. Alongside traditional outlets, a new generation of social-native publishers is creating relatable content around news, sport and culture, building audiences that many brands want to reach. Many operate with different editorial and commercial models from traditional outlets, which makes coverage less predictable and more likely to involve paid partnerships, boosting or commercial access. For PR teams, this creates a distribution problem.  The places where audiences discover content are not always accessible through traditional earned media, but they do not behave like straightforward paid media either.

This makes cut through much more difficult. Earned media still matters, but it’s less predictable than it used to be. It’s a shift that’s most obvious in PR. Journalists are fewer in number and under more pressure to deliver against tighter editorial deadlines, which is having a knock-on effect on comms teams. Cision’s Inside PR 2026 finds that 60% of PR professionals cite the changing media landscape as a top challenge. They must work far harder to get stories picked up than they did a few years ago.

The way content is served has changed too. On many platforms visibility now depends less on who someone already follows than on what the algorithms decide is relevant, interesting and likely to hold attention. Meta says its AI systems increasingly serve content from accounts people do not already follow.

Good content no longer travels simply because it is posted by a popular account, it needs to appear in contexts around the topics and in the formats that recommendation algorithms reward.

So, if earned media is harder to secure, and discoverability is increasingly shaped by platforms, algorithms and fragmented audience behaviour, the answer is to ensure that strong stories are given more deliberate support, so they reach the right people and stay visible for longer.

For brands, that means combining earned media with relevant creators and publisher platforms and adopting a more sophisticated paid strategy. In a fragmented, algorithm-led environment, paid support needs to be better targeted and better matched to context.

We originally built Cascade to solve a sponsorship problem. Rights-holder channels rarely reach the full audience a brand wants to influence. When we compare the follower base of a sports rights-holder’s owned digital channels with the total number of fans of that sport, there is usually a significant gap. Our analysis of rights holders shows that sponsorship digital channels typically reach less than 23% of the potential fanbase. Cascade helps fill this sponsorship gap.

As we roll Cascade out with more of our clients including Under Armour, ClearScore and Metrobank, we’re finding that the platform is also helping to bridge the earned media distribution gap. It does this by ensuring content reaches the right audiences with a distribution model that places content in the contexts that the latest algorithms reward.

That means identifying the relevant creators, fan communities, publisher platforms and paid opportunities to extend reach with greater precision.

Weak content still dies, but today strong content can’t succeed on merit alone.  To be discovered and shared by the people it will matter most to, in a media environment where attention is fragmented and earned routes are more competitive, content needs an up-to-date and effective distribution strategy behind it. Cascade is our answer to that challenge: a way to give strong stories a clearer route to the audiences they were designed to reach.

To discuss how Cascade can support your next campaign, contact hello@spacebetweenagency.com.