I'll be honest. I've lost count of how many times a client has looked at my agency's earned media ‘fees’ and said some version of: "It's just a bit high as a percentage of the overall budget." 

Every earned media specialist reading this knows exactly what I'm talking about. And I'd wager it's happening more often, not less. 

For a while, I thought this was a value problem — that brands simply didn't understand what earned media actually does. But I've changed my mind. Brands get it. Most marketers I talk to genuinely understand the power of earned content, especially now that AI is reshaping how people discover and trust brands. 

This isn't a value problem. It's an accounting problem. And it's one our industry has let slide for too long. 

We put earned media in the wrong column 

Here's how the budget conversation typically goes. Paid media gets classified as "working." Earned media — the pitching, the relationship building, the story creation, the placement — gets lumped in as overhead or non-working spend. Then, inevitably, someone in finance flags that agency fees look disproportionate compared to everything else. 

Of course they do. The entire function in the wrong column. 

Paid media is called "working" because you can point to a placement. A pre-roll, a banner, a sponsored post. You can see where the money went. But here's the thing — earned media also results in placements. Editorial features. Creator content. Cultural moments. Brand mentions that reach real audiences who actually chose to read, watch, or engage. 

That's not overhead. That's distribution. That's media. By any honest definition, it's working media — it's just that the work required to create it looks different. 

The AI factor changes everything 

If the accounting argument wasn't enough to shift the frame, the rise of AI-powered discovery should be. 

People aren't just scrolling and clicking anymore. They're asking. Asking ChatGPT, asking Gemini, asking whatever comes next. And those systems aren't pulling from your brand's own messaging or your latest campaign. They're drawing on third-party sources — editorial coverage, expert mentions, organic creator content. Earned media, in other words. 

Around 85% of the content LLMs use to answer brand-related questions is sourced from third-party content. Not owned. Not paid. Earned. 

So if your brand has been underinvesting in earned — treating it as a nice-to-have or a budget line to squeeze — you're not just missing out on coverage. You're quietly disappearing from the places where purchase decisions are now being shaped. No earned signals means no inclusion in those outputs. No inclusion means no relevance. 

That's a business risk, not a PR problem. 

The time spent is production, not process 

What I want Australian marketers and their finance teams to genuinely understand is this: when an earned specialist is developing a story angle, building a media relationship, crafting a pitch, or coordinating a creator partnership — that time isn't administrative. It's producing media outcomes. 

It's the equivalent of creative production for a paid campaign. Nobody looks at a TV ad production budget and calls it overhead. The output is media, so the work that creates it is working media spend. 

Earned is the same. The output is coverage, credibility, and cultural presence. The input — our time and expertise — is what makes that output possible. Reclassify the input, and the whole conversation changes. 

Not "why are your fees so high?" but "why have we been underinvesting in this the whole time?" 

A different kind of ROI 

Here's one more thing that doesn't get said enough: earned media compounds in a way paid simply doesn't. 

Switch off a paid campaign and the placements disappear immediately. But a well-placed editorial feature, a trusted creator recommendation, a brand mention in a credible publication — those keep showing up in search results, in AI outputs, in cultural conversations long after the work is done. One-time input, ongoing media value. 

That's not just good PR. That's a fundamentally different return profile. 

The brands that get this right — that stop treating earned as an afterthought and start funding it like the working media it is — will be the ones building visibility where it actually matters over the next few years. 

The rest will keep trimming the earned budget while wondering why nobody can find them.