The Media Mix Audit: Classifying a Real Brand's Coverage

Marketing Academy · Field Work●PR & Communications

All projects·From: Earned, Owned, and Paid Media: The PR Perspective

MiniAudit· 25 minutes

Delhivery

Objective: Given a real, currently operating brand's recent online presence, correctly classify ten items into earned, owned, or paid media, then calculate a share-of-voice number against one named competitor.

You're a marketing intern at Delhivery, the logistics and ecommerce fulfillment company, asked to build a quick media-mix snapshot before a stakeholder review.

Pick any real, currently operating brand, pull its last 10 online mentions, tag each earned, owned, or paid, and total what you find.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Alerts

FreeSurface recent mentions of the brand across the web

Free, no account needed beyond a Google login

Google Sheets

FreeLog and total the classified mentions and share-of-voice math

Free, sufficient for a 10-item tally

Paid upgrades (optional, faster/deeper)

BuzzSumo(optional)

FreemiumSearch a longer historical window of earned mentions than a live alert can back-fill

Useful once you need more than the last 7-10 days of coverage

The process

2 steps

Step 01 of 02

Classifying earned, owned, and paid media

Earned media is coverage nobody paid for, owned media is anything the brand fully controls, and paid media is anything with placement bought behind it.

Pull the last 10 online items mentioning a real brand of your choice, its own posts, press coverage, and any ads. How many fall into each of the three buckets?

Google Alerts— Set up a Google Alert for the brand name, then open its own website and one social profile in parallel tabs.

Procedure

Set up a Google Alert for the exact brand name and let it populate, or search the brand name directly if you need results faster than the alert digest
Open the brand's own website/blog and one official social profile to capture recent owned posts
Scroll each channel for any content visibly marked 'sponsored' or 'ad' to capture paid examples
List the 10 items in a sheet with a column for earned / owned / paid and one line of reasoning per item

Sample output

Brand: [chosen brand]

EARNED (4)
  1. Trade publication feature on Q2 expansion — journalist-written, no sponsorship disclosure
  2. Customer review on a third-party site
  3. Independent YouTuber unboxing video, unpaid per video description
  4. Industry newsletter mention in a roundup

OWNED (4)
  5. Brand's own blog post
  6. Brand's Instagram caption
  7. Brand's email newsletter excerpt
  8. Brand's LinkedIn company update

PAID (2)
  9. Instagram post marked 'Sponsored'
  10. Search ad appearing above organic results for the brand's category term

Healthy

The 10 items split roughly across all three buckets, with earned items showing zero sponsorship disclosure and a named third-party author.

Unhealthy

Every 'earned' item turns out to have a sponsorship disclosure or paid-partnership tag once you look closely, meaning it was actually paid media misclassified as earned.

What this means

The disclosure label, or its absence, is the actual test, not how organic the content feels; sponsored content can look exactly like earned coverage until you check.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
An item looked earned but had a sponsorship disclosure	Recategorize it as paid and note why in the reasoning column	5 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Step 02 of 02

Share of voice as a PR metric

Share of voice measures a brand's mention volume against named competitors in a defined time window, one of the metrics that replaced outdated ad-value-equivalent reporting.

Using the same brand, count its earned mentions over the last 7 days against one named competitor's earned mentions in the same window. What's the share of voice?

Google Sheets— Log both brands' 7-day earned mention counts side by side and compute the percentage.

Procedure

Search both brand names individually and count earned (unpaid, third-party) mentions from the last 7 days only
Enter both counts in a sheet: your brand's count, the competitor's count
Calculate share of voice as your brand's mentions divided by the combined total of both brands, as a percentage
Note one likely driver behind whichever brand has the higher share this week

Sample output

7-day earned mention count

  Brand A (chosen brand): 14 mentions
  Brand B (named competitor): 22 mentions
  Combined total: 36

  Share of voice, Brand A: 14 / 36 = 38.9%
  Share of voice, Brand B: 22 / 36 = 61.1%

  Likely driver: Brand B had a product announcement this week that Brand A did not.

Healthy

The share-of-voice math is transparent, both counts are dated to the same 7-day window and both use only earned (unpaid) mentions.

Unhealthy

Mixing owned or paid mentions into either brand's count, which inflates the number and makes the comparison meaningless.

What this means

Share of voice is only a fair comparison when both sides are counted the same way, same time window, same media type; skipping that discipline is how the metric gets gamed by accident.

So what do I do about it?

Symptom	Action	Effort
One brand's count includes its own owned posts	Strip owned/paid items out of both counts before comparing	5 min

YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

A one-page media-mix snapshot: 10 classified mentions with reasoning, and a share-of-voice percentage against one named competitor.

See a reference example

Sample output

Nykaa media-mix snapshot (excerpt)

EARNED (5): trade press feature, 2 independent reviewer mentions, industry newsletter roundup, unpaid influencer mention
OWNED (3): app push notification copy, Instagram grid post, email campaign line
PAID (2): Instagram 'Sponsored' post, category search ad

Share of voice vs. Myntra (7-day earned mentions): Nykaa 19 / (19+27) = 41.3%

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

Classifies all 10 items into earned, owned, or paid with correct reasoning
Calculates a share-of-voice percentage against a named competitor using only earned mentions in the same window