Paid, earned, shared, and owned media: fully operational, fully integrated
Your MarComm Operating System
The PESO Model is an integrated communications and marketing framework that helps brands build visibility, credibility, and trust by unifying paid, earned, shared, and owned media.
Created by Spin Sucks, the PESO Model gives marketers and communicators a straightforward way to plan, execute, and measure what matters—so your work shows up in boardrooms and search results (even the AI-generated ones).
Paid. Earned. Shared. Owned.
What Does the PESO Model Stand For?
Together, they’re not just your media mix—they’re your marketing operating system.
Paid Media
Use budget with purpose. Paid media accelerates reach, scales visibility, and helps you test what works—faster. It’s not just about ads but smart amplification across the funnel.
Earned Media
Earn influence, not just attention. From media coverage to podcast guest spots to analyst recognition, earned media signals trust—and today, it also trains the LLMs and the algorithms.
Shared Media
Your content in the wild. Shared media is where audiences engage, amplify, and shape your narrative. It builds community, distributes value, and strengthens relationships—human and algorithmic.
Owned Media
Your single source of truth. Owned media is where you house expertise, optimize for discoverability, and lead with value. It anchors your authority—and powers visibility in both search and AI-generated answers.
The PESO Model is a strategic framework that brings structure, alignment, and measurable outcomes to modern marketing and communications. It helps you stop spinning plates and start driving performance across every channel.
Why Use The Peso Model
Each media type plays a role. But it’s integration that makes them unstoppable.
If you want marketing and communications to be taken seriously inside the business, you need a model that connects the dots—and proves the value.
The PESO Model helps teams move from chaos to coordination. Instead of running separate campaigns across paid, earned, shared, and owned media, it gives you one strategic framework that connects everything—so your efforts reinforce each other, and your results multiply.
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Align your teams
PESO gives everyone—from brand leads to content creators to media buyers—a shared language and direction. No more siloed efforts or misaligned messaging.
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Integrate your strategy
It’s not “PR does this” and “marketing does that.” PESO brings your campaigns under one umbrella so every channel plays its part and works toward the same goals.
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Measure what matters
The model is built to show outcomes, not just outputs. You’ll move beyond impressions and vanity metrics into real indicators of visibility, engagement, and influence.
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Earn trust—algorithmic and human
In an era of AI-curated results, showing up consistently across high-authority channels matters more than ever. PESO helps you earn citations, mentions, and owned visibility that trains both the machines and your market.
Who is the PESO Model for?
It’s for marketers and communicators who are done with disconnected tactics—and ready to lead with strategy. The PESO Model works across industries, team sizes, and business models. This framework is for you if you’re responsible for building awareness, shaping reputation, or driving measurable growth.
For Enterprise Teams
The PESO Model becomes your marketing and communications operating system if you’re a CMO, CCO, or VP leading multiple brands or channels.
It aligns your teams, standardizes your approach, and gives leadership visibility into how communications is driving business outcomes.
- Break down silos across paid/earned/shared/owned
- Improve cross-functional coordination
- Operationalize trust, visibility, and reputation
- Prove business value to executive leadership
For Marketing and Comms Pros
Whether you lead a team or work inside one, the PESO Model helps you modernize your skills, elevate your strategy, and show measurable impact.
It’s how you move from task-taker to strategic advisor.
- Advance your career with a proven framework
- Build integrated campaigns across media types
- Learn how to plan, execute, and measure what matters
- Move beyond vanity metrics to real outcomes
For Agencies and Consultants
The PESO Model gives you a framework your clients can understand—and a system you can scale. Use it to win new business, align deliverables, and demonstrate results your clients care about.
- Differentiate your services with a licensed framework
- Standardize strategy and reporting across clients
- Build trust with data-backed results
- Train junior staff faster with a clear structure
For Educators and Students
The PESO Model is taught in leading PR and marketing programs, including Syracuse University and USC Annenberg. Use it in coursework, research, and real-world projects to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
- Teach integrated marketing communications in action
- Equip students with modern, in-demand frameworks
- Contribute to the evolution of PESO through academic research
For Government Agencies
The PESO Model helps government agencies modernize their outreach, build public trust, and deliver information with clarity, consistency, and credibility.
Whether you’re informing residents, engaging communities, or navigating high-stakes issues, PESO gives you a framework to align your efforts across departments and channels.
- Communicate clearly across platforms during high-priority initiatives
- Coordinate messages across internal teams, external partners, and public platforms
- Build long-term trust through consistency, transparency, and follow-through
- Demonstrate results with metrics that show reach, engagement, and public understanding
Want to see how teams like yours are using the PESO Model today?
How Does the PESO Model Work?
One framework to plan, execute, and scale integrated marketing and communications.
Start with your business goals, not your media tactics. The PESO Model helps you map those goals to the right mix of paid, earned, shared, and owned—with content, amplification, and timing planned from day one.
Owned content becomes your foundation. Shared distributes it. Earned reinforces authority. Paid accelerates what’s already working. You activate each channel with purpose—not in isolation.
Instead of reinventing the wheel for every campaign, the PESO Model supports consistent workflows, aligned teams, and repeatable processes that scale. It becomes your operating system for marketing and communications.
Metrics Matter
The Power of Measurable Integration
If you can’t prove it, it didn’t happen. That’s why the PESO Model was built with measurement baked in—not bolted on. From planning to reporting, it gives you the tools to connect your work to real business outcomes.
From Outputs to Outcomes
Stop tracking vanity metrics that leadership ignores. PESO helps you measure what actually matters: visibility, influence, conversion, and trust.
Think beyond:
- Impressions → to visibility in AI and search
- Clicks → to content journeys and engagement depth
- Mentions → to correlate brand outcomes
Attribution, Not Assumptions
The PESO Model supports structured measurement—so you can map tactics to results across channels. Use correlation models, campaign tagging, and journey mapping to show how paid, earned, shared, and owned actually move the needle.
Trusted by Humans.
Recognized by Algorithms.
When your work is visible across high-authority media and influencer sites and owned platforms, you train both buyers and machines. Brand mentions, citations, and structured content now influence how AI summarizes your brand.
The PESO Model doesn’t just help you execute better. It helps you prove your value—clearly, consistently, and in a language executives understand.
What Makes the PESO Model Different?
Most frameworks describe what good marketing should look like. The PESO Model shows you how to do it.
It’s Built for Integration
It’s Measurable by Design
It Evolves With the Industry
It Works in the Real World
It’s Not Just a Model. It’s a System.
How Do I Start?
Whether you’re ready to master the Model, bring it into your organization, or just want to test the waters, we’ve got you covered.
I want to learn it.
Get PESO Model® Certified. Learn how to build, scale, and measure integrated programs with on-demand training taught by the creator of the PESO Model.
I want to use it in my business.
License the PESO Model. If you’re using PESO to train teams, pitch clients, or deliver strategy, you need a commercial license. We offer Professional, Training, and Enterprise packages.
I want help implementing it.
Partner with Us on Strategy + Execution. From embedding with your team to designing custom playbooks and AI tools, we help large enterprises operationalize PESO across teams and campaigns.
Want to get really good at PESO?
AI-Powered PESO GPT
Your always-on PESO Model strategist.
It’s like having a PESO-certified strategist on demand, built by the people who invented the Model in the first place.
FAQs
Yes, with an educational license, you can. This is ideal for students writing papers, bloggers who cite their sources, researchers who include PESO in their work, and anyone who wants to reference the model in presentations or casual educational contexts.
It grants full permission to use the official PESO Model graphic in student projects, blog posts, research papers, citations, and conference presentations. You’ll receive a downloadable, non-editable graphic with proper attribution included.
That’s OK! The PESO Model is an operating system, not a checklist. Most programs start with owned, then layer in shared and earned. Paid is an accelerator you add once you see a signal on what’s working. Ideally, you’ll work with the team that does do paid media to amplify your top-performing content.
Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) is a philosophy—“let’s coordinate what we say across channels.”
The PESO Model is the operating system that makes that promise real. It provides a repeatable way to integrate paid, earned, shared, and owned media, so they reinforce one another instead of operating as disconnected tactics.
Where IMC asks, “Are we aligned?”, PESO asks, “What owned asset are we publishing, how will shared distribute it, which earned opportunities will compound it, and how will we use paid to scale what’s already working?”
It also bakes measurement into the workflow, so success isn’t just consistency of message; it’s outcomes tied to the business (authority, demand, pipeline, and retention). In short, IMC is the why of integration; the PESO Model is the how.
Legally, you can’t use PESO if you’re not licensed. Depending on your use, we offer licenses that range from free to…one billion dollars. Please contact us to determine the appropriate license for your organization.
Yes, yes, yes, yes! The brilliant thing about the PESO Model is that it scales for organizations of any size, with any budget, targeting any audience, because it’s an operating system, not a checklist. It will maximize your marketing and communications efforts by making every channel work smarter, not harder – delivering tangible business outcomes in language the C-suite will understand.
Who We Work With
Spin Sucks has helped leading brands and agencies operationalize PESO—from Fortune 500 brands and top-tier universities to agencies and solopreneurs.
Spin Sucks helped us do what every CMO talks about but few actually pull off—turn marketing into a measurable, strategic growth engine that delivered 6x performance improvement with the same resource investment. PESO isn’t just an operating system. It’s a competitive advantage.”
I just received great feedback from a partner in Global Costumer Office (operations) saying that while your Insight Circle today doesn’t relate directly to his work, he found it really aspirational and inspirational! He came to learn more, and you exceeded his expectations.”
We started thinking about PESO as a way to ensure all media types are covered during our campaigns instead of leading with paid and bolting on other tactics. You’ve given us a completely new way of working that has infiltrated our daily workflows.”
— CMO, global pharma brand
During the PESO training sessions with you and your team, we had an internal goal of having 100% participation from a certain segment of marketers. Not only did we reach that goal, but we had a big cohort of optional learners, too.”
— CMO, global pharma brand
Your Insight Circles were the most well-received training we’ve ever done. You averaged 150 attendees—during the summertime!—which is unheard of during normal business cycles, let alone in the middle of summer vacations.”
— CMO, global pharma brand
Explore & Learn
Toolkits, trends, and thought leadership to help you apply PESO and lead an integrated strategy.
Books
Explore books by Gini Dietrich, including deep dives on the PESO Model and modern MarComm strategies.
Blog
Smart, practical, and (let’s be honest) kind of funny. Stay current on trends, tactics, and leadership with 100,000+ readers.
Podcast
Get insights on PESO, leadership, and the evolving marketing landscape with Gini Dietrich.
Videos
Watch fireside chats, expert interviews, AMAs, and more — designed to make integrated marketing and comms practical and powerful.
Community
Ask questions, share wins, get feedback, and connect with peers.
Explore Certification
Reach out. We’re here to help. Email us at support@spinsucks.com.