In short. Yes. Earned media, the coverage, creator posts and mentions you don’t pay for, is alive, and it has a new job: it’s the material AI assistants cite when someone asks what to buy. It is also harder to get than it was five years ago, especially from creators, who now have paid options for everything. That’s the point. Paid is guaranteed and earned is hard, so earned is what carries weight with a parent, a buyer and a model. We’ve built our practice on it since 2010, and the way we earn it hasn’t changed much: a product worth talking about, in the right hands, at the right time, with a story attached.
Earned media used to mean press. Now it’s three things that behave the same way: a reporter’s story, a creator’s post you didn’t pay for, and a citation in an AI answer that pulled from either of those.
That third one changed the economics. Muck Rack’s analysis of more than a million AI citations found 89% point to earned sources (Muck Rack, 2025). Coverage you earned in November keeps working in March when a parent asks an assistant which stroller to buy. Paid placements don’t get that second life.
Two reasons, and we see both every week.
Creators have a rate card now. Ten years ago a good product in a creator’s hands produced a post. Today the same creator has brand deals, an affiliate link and a manager, and a free product competes with paid work for the same slot in their calendar. Earned creator coverage is the most time-consuming thing we do, and shipping someone a product is not the same as them agreeing to post about it. Make it easy, let them be creative, and don’t assume.
The release is not the work. A lot of brands think earned media is a newswire subscription. A wire has a purpose when there is news. Three releases a month with nothing behind them produce three wire listings and nothing a reporter or a model will touch. PR does not stand for press release.
Here’s one from our own files. Fujifilm Canada’s PrintLife products were featured in a Valentine’s Day giveaway segment on The Marilyn Denis Show, one of the biggest daytime shows in the country at the time. The host was surprised on air with a latte mug printed with her own prom photo and yearbook message. The segment aired in seven markets, Toronto, Ottawa, Kitchener, Montreal, Thunder Bay, Northern Ontario and Atlantic Canada, and by our count reached more than 10 million impressions.
Nobody bought that segment. What earned it was a product that made a personal moment possible, a producer who trusted our team to deliver it, and a pitch timed to a day when the show was looking for exactly that story. That’s the formula, and it hasn’t changed.
We start with the product in hand. Reporters and creators cover things they’ve touched. Our media showcase events exist for this reason: editors and creators meet the product before the season, and the coverage follows.
We pitch to the calendar. Toy and baby coverage runs on windows: Toy Fair, back to school, the hot-toy lists written in October, Valentine’s Day for a photo product. A pitch inside the window gets read. The same pitch in the wrong month gets filed.
We treat creators as creative partners, not media buys. We look for creators who can educate and entertain, who’ve earned trust in a specific community and whose work travels across social, retail and PR. Those are the ones who post because the product fits, not because the invoice cleared.
We keep the relationships warm between pitches. The producer who takes our call in February is the one we helped in November with a different story.
Earned isn’t a religion. Paid is guaranteed, and some moments need a guarantee: a launch date that can’t move, a retail window that closes, a message that has to land word for word. We run paid creator programs and paid media for the same brands we earn coverage for, and the two work best together: the earned story gives the paid placement something to point at.
What we won’t do is call paid “earned” in a report. Clients can tell the difference, and so can an AI model.
It's timing and preparation that look like luck from outside. The Marilyn Denis segment happened because the product, the producer relationship and the Valentine's window were all in place before the pitch went out.
A placement can land in a week when the story fits the window. A relationship takes seasons. Budget for both.
Specialists do well. Toy and parenting reporters want the brand that fits the story, not the biggest one, and a category-specific pitch beats a generic one.
Placements, reach, share of voice against named competitors, and, more and more, whether the brand shows up in AI answers for the questions its buyers ask.
About the author
Andrew Wagar founded Swerve Strategic Marketing in 2010 and runs it as President and CEO. He’s spent more than 30 years in PR and marketing, including PR Manager roles at Spin Master and the Canadian Standards Association.
He’s an Accredited Public Relations Professional (APR) with the Canadian Public Relations Society and has served on the Canadian Toy Association board since 2018, where he chairs marketing communications. Reporters covering the toy business call him when they need a source.
