TL;DR
Putting content in all four channels is not the PESO Model®. It’s a costume. Real integration means your channels inform each other, respond to each other, and prove shared results—and most programs are failing on at least two of those three counts.
Key Insights
- Having something running in each channel is omnichannel marketing, not PESO integration. The difference is whether those channels share a strategy or just share a calendar.
- Coordination means telling each other what you’re doing. Integration means changing what you’re doing based on what the other channels are learning.
- The most common measurement failure isn’t laziness; it’s not knowing which metrics actually connect to what leadership cares about.
- Emily Charlton (aka Emily Blunt’s character) energy—doing everything perfectly in her own lane—is the exact organizational behavior that prevents PESO from working.
- Real PESO integration creates compounding results: each channel makes the others more effective. Siloed channels just create more noise.
- If you can’t show your CMO a straight line from your marketing or communications program to a business outcome, you don’t have a measurement problem; you have an integration problem.
- The fix for all three pitfalls starts with the same question: What did we learn from one channel this week that changed what another channel did?
The Devil Wears PESO
Many, many September issues ago, I was obsessed with the fashion world. My dream was to only have clients in the fashion and beauty industries. I was even in a professional networking organization for the fashion industry, and I was out of my mind excited when I finally booked my flight to attend their annual conference in New York City. I hired a stylist to help me plan my outfits, I packed nary a single pair of flats, and I strolled into the opening keynote session feeling fabulous.
Only to look around and realize…all the true New York fashion industry legends? Wearing black. Simple. Understated. Nothing that would kill them to walk from the subway to their office building. Turns out the people actually doing the work know the fluff and ridiculous outfits just prevent them from getting sh*t done. Fast forward 10 years, and I’ve seen the same conundrum appear in every industry that attempts to dress up PESO Model® integration as just a fancy outfit.
If you’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada 2, you already know the central tension: everyone at Runway is working incredibly hard, dressing impeccably, and moving in the same general direction. And yet somehow the whole operation is quietly falling apart because no one is actually working together. Miranda is doing Miranda. Emily is running her own empire. Andy is trying to hold the vision together while the industry shifts beneath everyone’s feet.
Sound familiar?
That’s a lot of communications programs right now. Busy. Impressive-looking. Technically touching all four channels. And not integrated in any meaningful sense of the word. Florals, for spring? Groundbreaking.
The PESO Model is not a checklist or a “this is how we’ve always done things.” It’s not “we have a blog, we pitch media, we run ads, and we post on LinkedIn.” That’s a media mix. It might even be a decent one. But it is not the PESO Model, and if you’re calling it that, Miranda would like a word.
Here are the three places we see it go wrong most often, and what to do instead.
Pitfall #1: You Have All Four Channels. You Just Don’t Have a Strategy.
In the original film, Andy shows up to Runway wearing a perfectly blasé outfit and gets destroyed by Miranda in about four sentences. The problem wasn’t that she was underdressed by normal-person standards. The problem was that she’d dressed for a different game entirely.
Many of our clients come to us running “PESO” programs exactly like this. The paid team is running great ads. The PR team is landing solid placements. Fresh website content is being published on schedule. Social is active. Everyone is performing well according to their own metrics, in their own lane, for their own goals.
That is not integration. That is omnichannel marketing with a nicer name.
The PESO Model works when the four media types are deliberately connected. When your earned coverage amplifies your owned content, when your paid strategy accelerates what’s already working organically, when your shared media circulates proof that your owned content has earned. The channels aren’t just coexisting. They’re compounding.
Here’s how to tell the difference. If you could pull any one of your four channels out of the program tomorrow, and the others wouldn’t notice or adjust, they’re not integrated. They’re parallel. And parallel programs don’t compound; they just cost more to operate independently.
What to do instead: Start with one anchor piece of owned content—a perspective your brand genuinely owns—and map backward. What earned media would validate and extend this? What paid strategy would amplify it once it has proof? What shared media would carry it to the communities where your audience already talks?
If you can’t draw those lines, you don’t have a PESO program yet. You have four separate programs that happen to share a budget meeting.
Pitfall #2: Your Channels Talk to Each Other. They Just Don’t Listen.
Emily Charlton—the original Runway first assistant, now a luxury brand executive in the sequel—is the patron saint of this particular failure mode. She is meticulous, informed, and completely committed to running her own operation as perfectly as possible. When something crosses her desk from another lane, she absorbs the information and then keeps doing exactly what she was already doing, exactly the way she was already doing it.
This is the coordination trap. It looks like integration because there are meetings. There’s a shared calendar. The PR team knows the content team published a piece last Tuesday. The social team knows a placement has landed. Everyone is informed.
And then everyone goes back to their own plan.
The best work in our industry doesn’t just keep various teams and departments in the loop. Teams actively adjust based on what the other channels are learning. When earned media reveals that journalists keep framing your story around a particular pain point you hadn’t previously addressed, that’s a signal, and your owned content strategy should shift toward it.
When a piece of shared media unexpectedly catches fire in a specific community, your PR team should pitch to the publications the community reads. When paid testing reveals that one message variant converts at three times the rate of another, your content team should be writing around that message.
The intelligence flowing between channels should change what each channel does. Not just what each channel knows.
Most programs we see skip this entirely. Not because the people running them aren’t smart, but because there’s no mechanism for it. There’s no standing question in the weekly meeting: “What did we learn this week that should change something we’re doing?” There’s no shared dashboard. There’s no one person accountable for connecting the dots across all four channels.
(But by the way, this is what we can do for your organization as part of our Integration Team work!)
What to do instead: Add one question to your regular team sync: What signal from one channel should we act on in another this week? It sounds almost too simple. It is not. That question, asked consistently and answered honestly, is the beginning of actual integration.
Over time, build toward a shared dashboard where owned content performance, earned coverage themes, shared media engagement, and paid testing results all live together, not in four separate reports sent to four separate inboxes. You’re one stomach flu great question away from your goal weight PESO integration.
Pitfall #3: You’re Measuring Activity, Not Outcomes. Miranda Can Tell.
There’s a scene everyone remembers from the original film: Miranda receives Andy’s work and dismisses it not with anger but with something far worse: a quiet, devastating lack of interest. Andy had done the task. She just hadn’t understood what the task was actually for.
This is the measurement problem in most MarComm programs, and it is rampant.
The metrics most teams track (impressions, placements, follower counts, open rates, click-throughs) are activity metrics. They tell you the work is happening. They do not tell you whether the work is generating results. And when it comes time to walk into the CMO’s office or a board meeting and justify the program’s budget, “we had a great month for impressions” lands exactly like a poorly-chosen belt at Runway. You can see the lip-purse from across the table.
The failure here usually comes in one of three flavors. The first is lack of time: teams are executing so fast and spread so thin that measurement becomes an afterthought, something you do at the end of the quarter when someone asks. This is particularly true in today’s era of ever-shrinking marketing budgets and all-too-common mass layoffs.
The second is lack of resources. There’s no tool, no analyst, no infrastructure for connecting activity to pipeline or revenue outcomes.
If this is you, may I introduce you to our PESO Diagnostic Tool as a great starting point?
The third, and most common, is lack of clarity about what to measure in the first place. Most teams genuinely don’t know which metrics their leadership actually cares about, and they’ve never been told directly.
All three are solvable. But you have to pick the right problem.
If it’s time, build measurement into the program design, not at the end. Decide before you launch a campaign what you’ll track and what success looks like. A five-minute post-mortem is better than no measurement at all.
If it’s resources, start with what you have. Google Search Console and your email platform’s analytics together can tell you quite a bit about whether your owned content is actually reaching and resonating with the audience you’re trying to move. You don’t need enterprise software to begin.
If it’s clarity, go have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Ask your CMO or your CEO directly: “What would need to be true for you to consider this program a clear success?”
The answer to that question is your measurement framework. We did this once with a client and realized that, while at the beginning of the relationship he had said he just wanted to create as much “buzz” as possible, about a year into our engagement, he really needed more pipeline leads.
Don’t be afraid to keep pushing if you get a generic answer to this question the first time you ask. Eventually clients or your C-Suite leadership will always change their tune from “just awareness is great thanks” to “how do I measure the ROI on this?” We want you to be ahead of the game and resolve that issue before it even arises.
What to do instead: Build what we call a measurement tree. NOTE: This is not just another dashboard. At the bottom are activity metrics: the volume and reach stats that show the work is happening. In the middle are engagement metrics: signals that the right people are paying attention. At the top are business outcome metrics: pipeline influenced, sales cycle length, share of voice in your category, analyst and AI mentions, and customer acquisition costs.
Your program should be able to show movement at all three levels. If you can only show the bottom rung, you’re not measuring outcomes. You’re just proving you’ve been busy.
PESO Model Integration is a Behavior, Not a Structure
Here’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 gets right that most organizations miss: Miranda’s problem isn’t that Runway lacks resources or talented people. It’s that everyone has optimized for their own version of success in a world that requires them to win together.
Much like me walking into that conference in NYC way overdressed, your PR and Marketing have the same vulnerability.
The fix isn’t a new tool or a different agency or a bigger content calendar. It’s a set of behaviors: channels that share intelligence and respond to it; a team that asks every week what one channel learned that should change another channel’s approach; and reporting to your leadership that reflects actual business impact rather than activity volume.
The PESO Model is not a costume you wear to the budget meeting. It’s a system you run, consistently, in a way that makes each part more effective because of the others.
Miranda would expect nothing less. And quite frankly, so should you.
© 2026 Spin Sucks. All rights reserved. The PESO Model® is a registered trademark of Spin Sucks.
Share This:
