• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

You know how you sometimes sit in a meeting room, and something on a slide makes your mind wonder?  This week mine did. In a presentation, the “paid, earned, owned” framework jumped out at me. And my mind wandered and then wondered: Who came up with that? Who used it for the first time?

So this week’s column aims to answer the question, I wonder where that industry term came from?

Letting your mind wander from time to time has real value for your brain. According to the internet, when you do, your brain switches gears to a neural network called the Default Mode Network (DMN). While your conscious mind takes a break, the DMN is busy consolidating memories, organizing unstructured thoughts, and drawing connections between disparate pieces of information stored deep in your subconscious.

Using Google and Gemini as my friend, I let my brain take a gander among terms we see and use every day. “Paid, earned and owned” is attributed to Daniel Goodall, a digital marketing planner at Nokia. He was the first to publicly detail the "owned, bought [paid], and earned" media framework on March 2, 2009, on his blog “All That Is Good.” Nokia had been using it internally to organize its digital strategy. By December 2009, Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran published a report titled "Defining Earned, Owned And Paid Media" and formalized the terminology.

OK, marketing bingo example number two: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” This one is most commonly attributed to American department store pioneer John Wanamaker around 1919. But if you ask a marketer on the other side of the Atlantic, you will likely hear it credited to Lord Leverhulme, co-founder of Lever Brothers/Unilever in the 1920s. But neither Wanamaker’s historical papers nor Unilever’s corporate archives contain any proof that either founder ever said anything like it.

The earliest documented claim to coining "influencer marketing" comes from experiential marketer Michael Blatter in 1994. And if you thought “impressions” were a relative new thing, they are not. London businessman Thomas Smith published a book in 1885 called “Successful Advertising," laying the psychological groundwork for measuring repeated ad exposures. He famously mapped out what happens when a prospect sees an ad repeatedly, noting that the first time a person sees an ad they don't even notice it, and it takes up to twenty "impressions" before they pull out their wallet.

But by far my favorite industry expression is “In confusion lies margin." I always attributed that to Irwin Gotlieb, former CEO and Chairman of GroupM (WPP's media arm). But apparently, Gotlieb paraphrased "Where there's mystery, there's margin," coined by venture capitalist and software entrepreneur Dave Berkus in 1985. A closely related variation is “There is profit in confusion; the more confusion, the more profit", which was written by author Milton William Cooper in 1991.

So there you have it. An origins story of sorts, just because my mind needed a wander in a long meeting this week.

As mentioned, mentally stepping away and letting your mind drift triggers the incubation effect. Your brain continues processing problems in the background, which can lead to suddenly delivering a "eureka" moment. I hope it worked for you.