The POGLE Media Model: Why Email Marketing Isn’t Owned Media

The POGLE Media ModelEmail is the worst and most frustrating kind of owned media—because it’s not owned media at all. Email is like a pet dog. He doesn’t behave just because you “own” him.

If you think of email marketing as owned media, chances are that you struggle. Perhaps you rail against Outlook messing up your email designs. Perhaps you curse Gmail for not delivering your emails. Perhaps you get angry when people who opted in to get your emails then mark them as spam. Or perhaps you bristle at the thought of suppressing emails to subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in years. After all, they gave you permission. You own those email addresses.

It’s difficult to succeed with email marketing if you think of it like catalogs, direct mail, store signage, and other owned media. While brands create the content of their email messages and develop the audience that their emails are sent to, they don’t control the platform used to distribute that message. Inbox providers and email users control the platform.

That said, if you’ve always thought of email marketing as owned media, you can be forgiven. After all, if email isn’t owned media, then where does it fit into the paid-owned-earned (POE) media model? It’s not paid, because brands are not paying to reach an audience developed by a third-party. And it’s not earned, because the brand is creating the message, not consumers.

The problem is that the POE media model just can’t accommodate all modern marketing channels. While it did a good job of describing traditional media, it can’t account for most digital channels, which have generally been stuffed awkwardly into the owned media bucket

We need new language and a new framework to describe marketers’ various channel activities to bring greater clarity to the marketing mix. Say hello to the POGLE media model…

>> Read the full post on the Litmus blog

Comments are closed.