The Role of Paid and Earned Media in Building Entertainment Brands: Reminding, Informing, and Enhancing Enjoyment*

We study the role of social engagement and advertising in building entertainment brands. We develop a structural model of viewing behaviors and apply the model to a new television program setting using a data set that contains both viewing and stated expectations and experiences. We use this model to not only assess the relative impact of advertising exposures and social engagement, but also to distinguish multiple roles that advertising and social engagement might play–reminding (i.e., activating memory), informing (i.e., learning about the quality of the program), or enhancing enjoyment (i.e., gaining additional utility from socializing about the program). We present descriptive analyses and results from our structural model, both of which indicate that advertising effects are largely due to reminding, that social engagement effects are due to a combination of reminding and enhancing enjoyment, and that information comes primarily watching episodes. Our results imply that the average effect of paid media is four times larger than that of earned media, but that if earned media strategies can expand the proportion of frequent socializers, it can have a profound effect on viewership.