How the PESO Model© Helps You Work Smarter, Not Harder

A couple of weeks ago, we walked over to the Alamo Drafthouse in Wrigleyville (my favorite theater!) to see How to Train Your Dragon. As we walked, my tween gave me a full run-down of who everyone is, which dragons they ride, who is nice to whom (or not), and everything else to expect. 

Quite honestly, I expected to have a glass of wine and take a little snooze in the warm, dark theater. But I was pleasantly surprised! It’s a fun story about finding your way in life—and realizing that brute force isn’t a strategy.

Like the PESO Model©, it’s about integration, trust-building, and shifting from siloed tactics to a smarter, more connected approach.

Astrid does what every Viking-in-training is taught to do: she sharpens her axe, strengthens her stance, and prepares to charge into battle. Her goal? Slay the dragon. Win the glory. Save the village.

And then there’s Hiccup.

Instead of swinging a weapon, he studies the dragons. Observes their behavior. Learns their language. Designs a tool, builds a system, and earns the trust of the very creature everyone else is trying to kill.

Astrid works harder. Hiccup works smarter.

Sound familiar?

Integration = Scalability

Traditional marketing and communications still operate in Astrid mode—charging at dragons with brute force. Endless pitching. Reactive news releases. One team for social. Another for content. A third or fourth for paid. Everyone’s exhausted, but the dragons just keep coming.

Meanwhile, Hiccup-mode marketers have figured out another way. They’re using integrated strategies to scale trust, visibility, and results. They’re applying systems thinking to a chaotic media landscape. And they’re getting better outcomes—without burning out their teams or slashing their budgets.

That’s the power of the PESO Model.

It’s not just a framework—it’s your dragon-training blueprint. One that helps you work smarter in a fragmented, always-on world where content flies fast, attention spans are short, and your efforts need to do more than survive. They need to soar.

The Old Marketing Playbook

Astrid is brave. She’s skilled. And she’s doing exactly what she’s been taught: train harder, move faster, swing bigger. Without giving away the plot, the movie demonstrates that more effort doesn’t always equal better outcomes.

The same is true for traditional marketing and PR.

For years, we’ve been trained to believe that brute force—more emails, more content, more ads, more pitches—is the path to success. Flood the channels. Be everywhere. Push harder. 

And if it doesn’t work? 

Just do more.

This “more is more” approach still defines a lot of marketing programs today:

• Push content out, cross your fingers, and hope it sticks. Engagement is nice, but there’s no plan to nurture it.
• Social is doing one thing. Content’s chasing SEO. PR is off pitching media. Paid is optimizing ads. Everyone’s busy, but no one’s aligned.
• You publish a blog post, launch a campaign, or land a media hit… and then it disappears into the ether. No follow-up. No repurposing. No long tail.
• Reporting still leans on impressions, clicks, and vague “awareness.” It looks busy, but it’s hard to connect to actual business outcomes.

It’s like building four different campaigns for the same initiative—with four different messages, goals, and success metrics. Everyone’s swinging an axe at their own dragon, hoping one of them eventually takes flight.

Spoiler: Most don’t.

The casualties of this old-school approach stack up fast: budgets are blown on siloed tactics, time is lost to duplication, and morale is low because the team is busy, but not effective.

Astrid-style marketing is all hustle, no system. It may win a battle here and there, but it’s not a long-term strategy for winning the war—especially in a world where audiences are fragmented, channels are noisy, and executives want proof that every dollar they spend has an ROI.

That’s where the Hiccup approach—and the PESO Model—comes in.

Smarter, Systematic, Strategic

Hiccup doesn’t fight harder—he thinks differently.

Instead of rushing into battle, he watches. He listens. He connects the dots. And instead of seeing dragons as threats to conquer, he sees them as misunderstood, misaligned pieces of a much bigger system. He doesn’t just neutralize the threat—he transforms it into an advantage.

That’s exactly what the PESO Model helps modern marketers do.

While traditional campaigns focus on isolated wins, Hiccup-mode marketers build systems that scale. They know a viral social post, a killer piece of owned content, or a great media placement is only as valuable as the strategy that connects it to everything else. Integration isn’t an afterthought—it’s the operating system.

Here’s how the PESO Model mirrors Hiccup’s smarter approach:

• Paid Media: Your dragon-taming toolkit. Targeted, efficient, and scalable. Paid amplifies what’s already working across your other channels, bringing fuel to the fire without burning down your budget.
• Earned Media: Like Hiccup earning Toothless’s trust, earned media is about building credibility over time—through relationships, consistency, and value, not brute force.
• Shared Media: The village square of modern marketing. It’s where your brand’s reputation is co-created in real time, through comments, reposts, reactions, and community dialogue.
• Owned Media: Your dragon-training manual. This is the content you control—your blog, videos, newsletters, resource hubs—shaped by your expertise and aligned to your audience’s needs.

But the real magic happens when these four elements don’t operate independently—they fly in formation.

When your owned content fuels your shared channels, which drive visibility to your earned media, which is then amplified with paid—that’s a smart, efficient system. It’s less “swing at everything,” more “orchestrate something.”

It’s the difference between hoping for a hit and engineering momentum.

What Working Smarter Looks Like in Action

When you shift from swinging wildly to working systematically, everything changes.

With the PESO Model, your marketing becomes more than the sum of its parts. Instead of two or three or four teams running four separate campaigns, you build one integrated strategy that flows across paid, earned, shared, and owned media—maximizing every asset, every message, every moment.

Here’s how that might look in practice:

1. You start with a strong piece of owned content—say, a thought leadership article from your CEO or a research-backed trend report.
2. You break it down into snackable, shareable content for social media: a LinkedIn post, an Instagram carousel, YouTube Shorts (we love Vizard for this), TikTok videos, or a Twitter thread. That’s your shared media.
3. You pitch key insights to reporters or industry influencers, offering expert commentary or guest content. That’s earned media.
4. You use paid media to amplify top-performing pieces, drive traffic to your owned content, or retarget audiences who’ve already engaged.

Now you’ve taken one asset and turned it into a full campaign across all four media types—with consistent messaging, coordinated timing, and exponentially more reach.

Dove’s “The Real Cost of Beauty”

In 2022, Dove launched “The Real Cost of Beauty,” a campaign centered on the true story of young girls whose mental health was profoundly affected by toxic beauty standards on social media. 

The campaign was emotionally powerful, yet it also served as a textbook example of modern, integrated marketing in action.

• Owned: Dove created a dedicated campaign microsite with stories from a handful of girls, educational resources, and links to mental health partners. It became the hub for deeper engagement and action.
• Shared: The emotionally resonant video was published across Dove’s social platforms, where it quickly gained traction. Viewers began sharing their own stories, and the brand actively engaged in the conversation, amplifying user-generated content and showing solidarity with its community.
• Earned: The raw, authentic nature of the story drove media coverage across CNN, Fast Company, NPR, and others. Journalists covered both the creative angle and the broader mental health conversation Dove helped spark.
• Paid: Dove used targeted ads to amplify the video across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, ensuring it reached younger audiences and parents—two key groups affected by the issue.

Because each media type supported the others, the campaign didn’t just raise awareness—it changed the conversation. Dove saw millions of views, increased engagement, and deepened its brand equity in a way that advertising alone could never have accomplished.

And because the strategy was integrated from the start, every touchpoint worked harder. The story wasn’t just told once—it echoed, amplified, and evolved across the entire media ecosystem.

The Benefits of Working Smarter

When you implement the PESO Model the way Hiccup might train a dragon—patiently, strategically, and with an eye toward long-term trust and transformation—everything starts to click.

You stop spinning your wheels creating new content for every channel and start reimagining how each asset can work harder for you. 

A single article doesn’t just live on your blog—it becomes a series of social posts, a media pitch, a lead magnet, a newsletter feature, a podcast discussion, or even the foundation for a paid campaign. You’re not starting from scratch every time; you’re building on a core idea that’s strategically repurposed across all four media types.

Your messaging becomes more consistent, too. Because PESO forces collaboration, it naturally eliminates the silos that lead to mixed messages and misaligned campaigns. Your audience hears the same story—reinforced, expanded, and contextualized—no matter where they encounter your brand.

At the same time, your reporting becomes more meaningful. Instead of cobbling together results from separate dashboards, you start to see how everything connects. That media placement didn’t just get 30,000 impressions—it drove traffic to your website, where readers downloaded your report, joined your email list, and ultimately converted. You start connecting communications to business results.

With all of this in place, decision-making becomes faster and smarter. You know which content formats perform best. You see which channels drive the most qualified leads. You can optimize campaigns in real-time, without waiting for the next quarterly review to find out what worked (or didn’t).

Working smarter doesn’t mean doing less; it means doing more effectively. It means making every tactic, every message, and every minute of effort do more.

Smart Strategy + Hard Work = Real Power

Let’s be clear: Astrid isn’t the villain in this story.

She’s courageous. She’s focused. She’s incredibly good at what she does. We all have a little (or a lot) of Astrid in us. We’ve been taught that hustle, speed, and grit are the markers of success. We’ve been rewarded for reacting quickly, working long hours, and saying yes to all the things.

And for a long time, that worked. Until it didn’t.

Because the world changed. The dragons multiplied. The terrain got more complex. And what used to work—volume, velocity, brute-force tactics—just doesn’t scale anymore.

But here’s the beautiful thing: Astrid evolves.

She doesn’t abandon her strength. She doesn’t toss aside her experience or instincts. She simply adds strategy to the mix. She sees Hiccup’s approach working. She watches how integration, trust, and smart systems create better results with less collateral damage. And eventually, she joins him—not because she’s giving up, but because she’s growing up.

That’s what the PESO Model invites you to do, too.

You don’t have to stop being scrappy, responsive, or relentless. Those are assets. But when you combine that with smart, integrated planning—when you trade isolated efforts for orchestrated ones—you become unstoppable.

Hard work + smart systems = real power.

That’s the evolution. That’s how you go from putting out fires to building a fire-breathing engine of momentum. From chaos to clarity. From a pile of tactics to a measurable, meaningful strategy.

So if you’ve been operating in Astrid mode, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just ready for what’s next.

Building Your Dragon Training Academy

Whether you’re a solo communicator, leading a small team, or managing across departments in a large organization, building your own dragon training academy—the infrastructure to run an integrated PESO Model program—starts with a few core moves.

Step One: Audit What You’re Already Doing

Before you train anything, you have to understand what you’re working with. Take stock of your current efforts across paid, earned, shared, and owned media. What’s working? What’s duplicated? What’s disconnected? You might be surprised to discover you’re already doing parts of the PESO Model—it just hasn’t been connected… yet.

Ask yourself and your team:

• Are we producing content regularly? Where does it live? What content gaps do we have? Are we answering the questions that customers and prospects ask? 
• What’s our process for media outreach or influencer engagement?
• Are we investing in paid promotion—and if so, to what extent?
• What does our social strategy look like? Who owns it?

This isn’t about judgment. It’s about building a smarter flight plan with the assets you already have.

Step Two: Align Everything to Business Outcomes

Dragons don’t care about vanity metrics, and neither does the leadership team. The PESO Model is at its most powerful when it’s aligned with measurable business goals: increasing conversions, driving qualified leads, deepening customer loyalty, and/or elevating brand trust.

Ask yourself and your team:

• What are the top three business priorities this quarter?
• How can our media mix support those goals?
• Are we measuring awareness and action?

This is where your strategy stops being a list of tasks and begins to become a tool for achieving results.

Step Three: Create Once, Distribute Intelligently

Remember: Working smarter isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing more with what you have.

Take a single piece of high-value content—say, a research report, webinar, or leadership POV—and turn it into a dozen strategic assets:

• A blog post (owned)
• A series of quotes and data cards for social (shared)
• A media pitch with original insights (earned)
• Targeted ads to drive traffic to the report (paid)

One idea. Four media types. Exponential reach.

Step Four: Build Cross-Functional Workflows

No more rogue teams running parallel campaigns. Your dragon academy runs on collaboration. Set up recurring syncs, shared content calendars, and joint planning sessions among PR, content, social, and digital teams. Bonus points if you invite product or sales into the mix.

This is how you slay the siloed beast.

Step Five: Invest in Tools That Fuel Integration

You don’t need an endless tech stack, but you do need the right tools to help you operate smarter:

• Dashboards that unify performance across PESO channels
• AI content tools that help you map and repurpose core ideas
• CRM systems that track influence from awareness to conversion
• Media intelligence tools to show how visibility translates to trust

Technology should support your strategy—not drown it.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Every dragon trainer has a few scorch marks. Keep an eye out for these:

• Treating PESO like four separate checklists instead of a unified system
• Running parallel tactics at the same time
• Creating too much content without a repurposing plan
• Running campaigns that don’t ladder up to clear business goals
• Siloed teams that never cross paths until the campaign goes live

Integration takes intention, but it also pays off. Big time.

The New Viking Way

By the end of How to Train Your Dragon, the village isn’t just safer—it’s transformed. Dragons aren’t feared, they’re understood. They’re not threats, they’re allies. The community doesn’t fight harder. It functions smarter. Together.

That’s the goal of the PESO Model.

When your team stops swinging in isolation and starts flying in formation, everything changes. 

Media hits don’t vanish into the void—they become high-value assets that drive engagement and trust. 

Content isn’t a siloed effort—it’s a strategic engine that powers every channel. 

Social isn’t just noise—it’s a listening tool, a distribution channel, and a relationship builder. 

Paid doesn’t just drive clicks—it amplifies what’s already resonating.

You move from chaos to coordination. From hustle to harmony. From effort to results. From activities to outcomes.

The dragons still exist, of course. (Let’s not pretend marketing ever gets easy.) But, when you build the systems, train the team, and lead with strategy, you’re no longer fighting them. You’re flying with them.

And that’s the new Viking way.

So, here’s your challenge this week: Take a look at your current efforts. Where are you still swinging the axe? And where could you start building something smarter?

Because the real secret isn’t doing more—it’s doing it better, together.

Which dragon will you train today?

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