Earned media marketing masters is a term used to refer to brands or people who create content that is remarkable enough such that it commands the attention of the intended audience on the digital space. This week, Miley Cyrus became the Earned Media Marketing Master after her legendary and controversial performance during the Video Music awards of MTV on Sunday night. Since the awards, major media outlets have depicted the performance by Miley Cyrus as “unacceptable,” “really, really disturbing,” “raunchy” and desperate. However, all the critics seem to have forgotten something, which by the way is actually the most important of all: the performance was brilliant.
After the performance, Miley Cyrus was berated and criticized in an onslaught in the social media which she might never be able to bounce back from. However, she is not intending to bounce back from it and the reality, love it or hate it, is that the innocent girl, Hanna Montana, is gone and the Cyrus now holds the answer to her own future, regardless of how dangerous this might be.
The campaign of shock and awe from Miley Cyrus, which was unexpected considering she is a former Disney girl, has in reality served as an incredible launch for her project of rebranding. People have been diverted by all the criticism directed towards MTV and Miley Cyrus that they have fallen short of recognizing and understanding the tactic behind her blustery performance during the Video Music Awards. Through her performance, Miley has now fully griped two distinct advantages of earned media ensuing from her spectacle during the performance: the social media buzz and brand awareness. According to Forbes.com, Miley Cyrus performance prompted around 306,100 tweets per minute on Twitter. It also resulted in more than 10 million Google searches to be registered on Sunday alone. And even though people would not like to believe it, Miley Cyrus knew that her VMA performance would lead to an uproar – in fact she was counting on it.
Following the Sunday performance, Miley Cyrus has now featured in numerous articles from Examiner, USA TODAY, MTV, LA Times, CNN, TIME, Rolling Stone, CNBC and almost everything in between. This is without even mentioning the fact that she now has the top 4 hottest articles on Huffington post and the top 5 from BuzzFeed. Currently, the only people who probably have not heard of the rebranding of Miley Cyrus are most probably living beneath a rock. That is how powerful earned media is.
The hit actor from Cyrus hit the digital world with so much fore that it was measured on Richter scale. While the performance is without doubt offensive and vulgar to many people, one cannot deny the fact that it at last got her position across: she was no longer the little girl, and she is certainly not Hanna Montana.
A marketing strategy from earned media is unparalleled in the ability to reverberate with the audience targeted on the digital space if it is executed properly. According to statistics, 90% of the website traffic is achieved from earned media like the one from Miley Cyrus.