Marketing
Definition
Paid media is any marketing channel where you pay to distribute your message or reach an audience — including search ads, social media ads, display advertising, sponsored content, and out-of-home placements.
Paid media is one vertex of the 'owned, earned, paid' media framework. Owned media is content you control (your website, email list, social profiles). Earned media is coverage you didn't pay for (press, word-of-mouth, organic shares). Paid media is everything you buy: Google and Microsoft search ads, Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and TikTok social ads, LinkedIn ads, programmatic display and video, sponsored newsletter placements, podcast ads, and out-of-home. Each channel has distinct audience access, intent signals, creative formats, pricing models, and optimization levers — and not every channel is appropriate for every business.
Paid media strategy begins with understanding where your target audience spends attention and what intent state they're in when they see your ad. Search ads (Google, Microsoft) capture active demand — people who are already looking for a solution. Social ads (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn) create demand — interrupting a scrolling audience with a message compelling enough to make them stop and act. These two modes require fundamentally different creative, messaging, and landing page strategies. Programmatic display and video sit largely in the brand awareness layer, building recognition and recall at scale.
A paid media operation requires ongoing, data-driven management: creative testing, audience and targeting refinement, bid strategy optimization, budget allocation across campaigns and channels, landing page alignment, and attribution analysis. Modern paid media is also increasingly complex due to signal loss from iOS privacy changes, cookie deprecation, and platform-level attribution discrepancies — making first-party data strategy and multi-touch attribution modeling important adjacent competencies.
Paid media can be the fastest lever for growth when built correctly — but it's also one of the most efficient ways to burn budget when mismanaged. Businesses running their own ad accounts without deep platform expertise commonly overpay for traffic, target the wrong audiences, use creative that doesn't convert, or fail to correctly attribute results. A paid media specialist brings platform depth (understanding the algorithms, bidding mechanics, and audience tools of each channel) and strategic judgment (knowing which channels to use, when, and with what expectations).
For businesses scaling past the point where the founder can manage ads themselves, hiring a paid media expert is typically one of the highest-ROI investments in the marketing stack — freeing the team from tactical execution and replacing guesswork with a rigorous testing and optimization process.