Earned First Instead of Social First

The flaw in a consumer-first mindset is not the effort to understand consumers. That remains indispensable. The flaw lies in what is done with that understanding. The more energy is invested in personalisation, the more invisible brands become in the cultural arena. The more money is poured into personalised reach, the louder the silence behind it becomes.

Social-first is the logical extension of that thinking: if the consumer is the point of departure and the algorithm takes care of distribution, the channel becomes the brief. Anyone who starts with the question, “What should we do on Instagram?” can no longer build an integrated campaign from that point. The outcome is familiar: a monoculture of content that may perform in the algorithm if it gets lucky, but does not stay in people’s minds.

Owned, earned and paid media correspond to corporate publishing, public relations and advertising. These channels have existed for as long as the industry itself, but their weighting has never been the same. In the era of the major media agencies, paid dominated because reach was the scarce resource. In the early 1990s, integrated communications emerged as a countermodel: the idea at the centre, with all three channels treated as equally important instruments.

That promise was never fulfilled, and social-first has now buried it for good. Structurally, it is not progress at all. It is TV-first with different channel logos, the algorithm replacing the media plan.

What is now being discussed under the label of “earned-first” therefore sounds new, even though it is really a return to an old question: what do we have to do to make people talk about it voluntarily? For a long time, that question was treated as optional. Today, it is the real measure of quality.

The most interesting signal is a hiring decision. In 2025, Uncommon Creative Studio, one of the most sought-after creative agencies in the world, launched its own PR, Culture & Influence practice. It is led by Randy Manicks, formerly Managing Director at John Doe, a London-based cultural communications agency whose clients include Nike, Instagram and LVMH.

The appointment is a statement in itself. Uncommon is not bringing traditional media relations in-house, but cultural PR expertise. Behind that sits a clear realisation: earned capability can no longer be outsourced, because it begins within the creative process itself, not in the amplification phase afterwards. Co-founder Nils Leonard puts it succinctly: “Fame creation is at the core of our operating system – a fundamental, not an afterthought.”

What this looks like in practice was on display during New York Fashion Week 2025: a claw machine in SoHo, with an original Hermès Birkin as the prize, effectively impossible to win. No press release, hundreds of people queueing, global media coverage. Friction creates conversation. Conversation creates fame.

A Birkin you cannot win stays in people’s minds. The claw machine works as a metaphor for New York’s obsession with unattainable luxury: you see the prize, you reach for it, you fail. As Lead Creative Sam Shepherd put it: “In NYC, pain is the cost of proximity to greatness.”

The project is called PAIN. It was self-initiated, with no client brief behind it. That is precisely what makes it such compelling proof: Uncommon stages itself as evidence of the very principle it sells. Ideas that are worth passing on, even without media budget behind them. The campaign is not a container for messaging, but an experience that tells its own story.

Earned-first is above all a question of sequence. The idea comes first, before any decisions are made about channels or budget. Consumer understanding remains the starting point: human truths, social tensions, cultural entry points, all understood as fuel for ideas. The decisive question shifts from “What does the consumer want to see?” to “What would the consumer want to pass on?”

Anyone who starts with the second question is thinking in integrated terms almost automatically. An idea of that kind requires PR intelligence during its development, not only in the amplification phase afterwards, and owned channels that add depth to it. Paid media amplifies and extends, but it does not replace what the idea itself has to achieve.

Randy Manicks puts it this way: “Brands have a choice: earn attention, or pay for it. We'll always choose the first.” That may sound like positioning, but it is really a decision about how an organisation chooses to work, and that requires consistency, not a one-off spectacle, but a system that repeatedly produces things worth passing on.

Today, AI can produce content at every level of quality, quickly, cheaply and at scale. What it does not produce are things people choose to talk about voluntarily. That has less to do with creativity than with conviction: earned media is the result of ideas that go beyond mere synthesis and are willing to take a risk.
Fame is not created by telling stories, but by creating things worth talking about. That line captures exactly what separates strong brand leadership from competent content production, and what the industry has systematically lost sight of over the past twenty years.

The experiment has been evaluated. The question now is who is prepared to act on the findings.