Paid and earned media work better together: What marketers can do now

As media becomes more fragmented, expensive and competitive, paid and earned strategies are increasingly interdependent. At an ADWEEK House Advertising HQ group chat co-hosted with Weber Shandwick, marketing leaders from Mars, Samsung Electronics America, MAC Cosmetics and Luma AI joined Weber Shandwick’s Joy Farber Kolo, Omnicom Media’s Jonathan Rigby and ADWEEK Executive Editor Alison Weissbrot to explore what stronger collaboration looks like in practice.

One takeaway: integration starts before a campaign launches. When teams align around the same business challenge and develop the brief together, they can consider a wider range of solutions—and decide when each channel can have the greatest impact. Frequent, focused check-ins can help maintain that alignment as opportunities emerge, while shared goals and measurement can build support for changing established planning processes.

The conversation also explored how AI is reshaping the relationship between paid and earned. Earned coverage and trusted brands can contribute to visibility in AI-powered search, while paid media can use AI to make personalization more achievable and improve efficiency. Together, these shifts create new opportunities for teams to coordinate around audiences, terms and outcomes.

The challenge isn’t simply to combine two media plans. It’s to bring different disciplines together early, learn from one another and make decisions around shared goals.