✅ Addressing the limitations of the PESO model

A new public relations planning model suggests that there are 14 types of media, organised by message control versus amplification and moderation

The Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned (PESO) model has helped us understand the media landscape for the past decade. It’s a neat conceptualisation used by public relations and corporate communications practitioners to organise media activities.

PESO has been invaluable as a concept in helping understand the media landscape beyond earned media. Importantly, it provides a language and framework for social, owned and paid media.

However, the modern media environment is showing up the limitations of PESO.

The first challenge is that the PESO model is a simplified model that places an organisation at the centre of its media universe. It doesn’t provide any means to understand an organisation's relationship perspective.

Second, you must work hard to fit new forms of media, such as hijacked, influencer, rented and search, into the PESO playbook. It strains the model to breaking point.

I could go on, but there’s no need. A group of European researchers have done the thinking. Mark Badham, Vilma Luoma-aho and Chiara Valentini have developed a new model called the Digital Media Arena (DMA) framework, which was published in the Journal of Communication Management last year.

The researchers used a qualitative approach to interpret how Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin's 2022 party video played out in different media spheres.

Mark invited me to join the Leeds Business School Conference panel in January. He presented the work of the DMA team. It’s a great example of applied research that immediately spoke to the practitioner perspective.