In an excellent article Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places published in Harvard Business School magazine, David C. Edelman discuss how the internet is transforming the economics of marketing.

His research shows that while most marketing budgets spend goes to advertising and retail promotions that hit consumer in considering and buying stage, consumers are often influenced more during the evaluate and enjoy-advocate-bond stages.

In many categories the single most powerful impetus to buy is someone else’s advocacy. Yet many marketers focus on media spend (principally advertising) rather than on driving advocacy.

If a product gets weak reviews—or worse, isn’t even discussed online—it’s unlikely to survive.

Today, most marketing budget devoted to paid media (advertisements). This no longer makes sense. Now marketers must also consider owned media (that is, the channels a brand controls, such as websites) and earned media (customer-created channels, such as communities of brand enthusiasts). And an increasing portion of the budget must go to “nonworking” spend—the people and technology required to create and manage content with a profusion of channels and to monitor or participate in them.

In the light of David’s recommendations, and as I wrote before, it’s the time to consider Rewarded-Media™ in addition to paid media, owned media and earned media.

Rewarded Media allows marketers to proactively incentivise publishers, bloggers and advocates to write and refer readers to them. While Publishedin Reward-Per-Click program is similar to Google Pay-Per-Click model, there is a big difference. Marketers, instead of paying for advertisements that will disappear when budget is over, now will reward publishers who have a genuine interest in them. Moreover, by starting relations, marketers can build a network of publishers around them and grow their reach.

As I said before, we believe that the winners in the future will be the ones that have the largest network of relations with online publishers who influence the purchasing decisions of consumers.