Whta is paid media?

What is paid media?

Paid media includes any type of marketing you pay for in order to increase traffic. It is particularly useful when you are a new company or you are launching a brand new product and you need to build awareness.

It is also useful to retarget visitors to your website or app once they have excited them.

Classic paid media

Classic paid media includes TV, radio and print advertising. Online, a popular form of paid media is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) where advertisers bid on ads that will appear on organic search results.

As the name suggests, you only pay when someone clicks on your advert.

In a digital sense, this is advertising that is injected into an online experience such as an article, video or app. This can be disruptive, think of Snapchat ads which play between the stories of those who you follow.

Or, it can be passive as in LinkedIn where text ads are displayed across the top of the page without stopping you from using the product as you consume the ad.

Social platforms

Almost all social platforms today are free to use, and as the saying goes: “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”.

As consumers have become more aware of this value exchange, they’ve become more tolerant of this form of social advertising. As these adverts become more and more relevant to customers this acceptance is only likely to increase.

Advertising platforms

Social platforms have adopted a similar approach to advertising platforms. The classic model requires you (the user) to state your objective and then create an audience profile to define who you want to target.

You are then required to state what is your budget and timeline before creating your ads. The simplicity of the process has made sophisticated advertising accessible to anyone.