By Fergus Kibble | FORWARD Agency | March 2026
For two decades, the earned media playbook was simple. You had a story. You pitched it to journalists. If the story was strong and your relationships were good, you got coverage that drove awareness and built the kind of credibility advertising could never replicate. Journalists decided what was newsworthy. Audiences consumed what was put in front of them.
That system has been fundamentally restructured. Coverage used to create momentum. Now, momentum creates coverage. If you are still building campaigns designed to impress a journalist before they impress a community, you are solving yesterday's problem with yesterday's tools.
According to the Reuters Digital News Report 2025, social and video networks now outpace TV news and news websites for weekly reach in the US, with social video news consumption growing from 52% to 65% since 2020. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 confirms the shift: trust in major news organisations has dropped 11 points over five years, while trust in personal networks has risen by 11.
Twenty years ago, a story reached the public because a journalist published it. Today, it reaches the public because someone shared it, a creator remixed it, a community debated it, or an algorithm surfaced it. The journalist often arrives after discovery, not before. That is the discovery inversion.
Cision's State of the Media 2025 found 96% of journalists use social media professionally, with 42% using it to find and vet sources. Yet the Muck Rack 2026 State of Journalism report shows only 21% rate social media as "very important" for reporting. Journalists may not think social shapes their editorial judgement, but the data suggests it determines which stories break through.
The discovery pathway has flipped. Stories that gain traction socially attract media coverage, not the other way around. Journalists are now amplifiers as much as they are originators.
Most earned media strategies are still designed as if journalists are the starting point of public conversation. Brands invest weeks crafting press releases and scheduling embargo briefings, only to wonder why a national placement generates a fraction of the engagement it would have five years ago.
The problem is not that coverage has lost its value. In an era where AI systems use published media as training data and citation sources, coverage has become critical infrastructure for brand credibility. The problem is that coverage alone no longer creates the cascade of attention it once did.
The truth nobody wants to hear: most brands are spending time and budget chasing coverage that nobody shares, nobody discusses, and nobody remembers 48 hours later. The coverage lands, the team celebrates, and then silence.
The WARC 2026 Global Advertising Report shows 80% of global ad spend flows into retail media, paid search, and social platforms. The irony? Earned media delivers up to 5x more ROI than paid, with influencer-driven earned content returning $5.78 per dollar spent. A channel that outperforms paid on every metric that matters, and most brands are either underinvesting or executing against an outdated model.
Instead of designing ideas for journalists and hoping the public cares, design ideas for communities and give journalists a reason to cover what is already in motion. This is not about replacing media relations. It is about sequencing.
Layer 1: The Shareable Core. Would someone share this if no media outlet covered it? Not your team. Not your client's stakeholders. A real person with no professional obligation to care. If the answer is no, the idea is not ready.
Layer 2: Creator and Community Hooks. Can creators react to it, remix it, challenge it, or build on it? The most effective earned campaigns do not just attract attention. They create participation. They give people raw material for their own content.
Layer 3: Media Hooks. Coverage is still critical, but in this model it arrives as acceleration, not ignition. When a journalist sees a story already generating conversation, the pitch becomes easier. The coverage pours fuel on an existing fire rather than trying to spark one from cold.
Layer 4: Algorithmic and AI Hooks. AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity draw on published media to construct answers. Coverage that is well-structured, clearly attributed, and rich in factual claims becomes part of a brand's AI-readable credibility layer. This is not an afterthought. It is a strategic imperative.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Pitch media first | Build audience reaction first |
| Coverage was the goal | Coverage is fuel |
| Journalists drove discovery | Communities drive discovery |
| Newsworthiness mattered most | Shareability matters equally |
The new model is shareability-first. Design ideas that people want to participate in, then layer on creator hooks, media hooks, and AI hooks in sequence.
Duolingo did not announce the "death" of mascot Duo the owl with a press release. It started with a single dramatic, ambiguous post on X designed to provoke confusion, humour, and debate. Brand mentions spiked 25,000%. The initial post reached 144 million views. Dua Lipa's reshare added another 22 million. Then the media came: 450 news articles, 60% in top-tier outlets. The social conversation came first. The media followed because the story was already undeniable.
Liquid Death treats the brand as an entertainment company that happens to sell canned water. Every piece of content is designed to be shared, not just consumed. Revenue grew from $3 million in 2019 to $333 million in 2024, reaching a $1.4 billion valuation. The brand has accumulated 21 billion social impressions and 14 million followers. Liquid Death does not pitch stories to journalists. It creates cultural moments journalists cannot ignore.
Ryanair has 2 million TikTok followers with over 21 million likes, 64 times greater than nearest competitor EasyJet. How? By participating in culture with self-awareness, humour, and a willingness to take the piss out of itself. The media coverage follows naturally because it is genuinely interesting, not because anyone pitched them.
Who Gives A Crap launched when co-founder Simon Griffiths live-streamed from a toilet for 50 hours. A 2023 campaign generated 54.2 million TikTok views and 609,000 engagements. Aldi Australia took a different approach. Its Special Buys range generates enormous organic UGC on TikTok, with nearly 2 billion social impressions globally. Aldi did not ask for this content. It built a product experience so surprising that people could not help but share it.
In every case, the pattern is the same. The brand created something worth talking about. Communities talked. Creators amplified. Journalists covered it. The sequence matters.
Before you launch anything: Would someone share this if no media outlet covered it? Not your team. A real person with no professional obligation to care. If the answer is no, the idea needs more work.
Stop building campaigns with one hook for one audience. Build campaigns with three hooks for four audiences. Earned hooks for journalists, creator hooks for amplifiers, and community hooks for advocates.
At FORWARD, we believe the best communications work happens when earned ideas are amplified by creativity and carried through culture at speed by social. We call it Earned x Creative x Social.
Earned is third-party validation from journalists, creators, and communities. The credibility that paid media cannot manufacture. In an era of declining institutional trust, earned authority is more valuable than ever.
Creative is the ideas that amplify earned authority across channels. A single piece of coverage is a moment. Creative that feeds creator content, social conversation, and AI citation turns that moment into a system.
Social is the velocity layer that carries ideas through culture at speed. Communities, creators, and algorithms as distribution. The window of relevance is measured in hours, not weeks.
The brands that will dominate earned media over the next five years understand something simple but consequential: you do not earn attention by asking for it. You earn it by creating something worth talking about, making it easy to share, and giving communities a reason to claim it as their own.
Coverage follows conversation. Not the other way around.
Earned media has not lost its power. It has changed its sequence. Build for sharing before you build for coverage. Design for communities before you design for journalists. In 2026, the best pitch is a story that is already being told.
No. In many ways it has become more important. Media coverage now serves as critical infrastructure for AI visibility, with systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity drawing on published articles to construct answers about brands and categories. What has changed is its role in the attention sequence. Coverage is no longer the starting point of public awareness. It is an accelerant that compounds momentum that already exists.
Earned media delivers up to 5x more ROI than paid channels, with influencer-driven earned content returning $5.78 per dollar spent. But measurement needs to go beyond simple media value calculations. Track social amplification, secondary media pickups, share of voice relative to competitors, and increasingly, AI citation rates. The most sophisticated frameworks connect earned media activity to business outcomes like search volume, direct traffic, and conversion lift.
Arguably more than large brands do. Earned media is the great equaliser. Budget does not determine shareability. Who Gives A Crap launched with a co-founder live-streaming from a toilet. Liquid Death started as a $3 million brand built almost entirely on earned and social attention. The new rules reward creativity, cultural fluency, and speed over spend. For small brands with limited budgets, earned media is the most efficient growth channel available.
AI systems construct answers by drawing on published, authoritative sources. Media coverage from credible outlets is a primary input these systems use to determine what information is trustworthy. Earned media now serves a dual purpose: building trust with human audiences and visibility within AI systems. Brands that consistently earn coverage from reputable sources are more likely to appear in AI-generated answers, creating a compounding advantage paid media cannot replicate.
Fergus Kibble is a communications strategist specialising in earned media, consumer PR and AI visibility. He writes about how brands can build credibility faster, create ideas people care about, and move at the speed of culture. This article is part of FORWARD's Communications at the Speed of Culture series.
