Reframing Communications as a Growth Multiplier
The World Advertising Research Center (WARC) recently released an insightful report, The Multiplier Effect, underscoring a critical insight in modern marketing: the false dichotomy between brand and performance advertising. The report makes an empirical case that the most effective advertisers integrate brand and performance disciplines, recognizing that strong brand equity acts as a force multiplier for performance efficiency. While the report focuses primarily on paid media, its insights open the door to further exploration – particularly in understanding how earned, owned and creator communications channels contribute to The Multiplier Effect.
This is where predictive analytics in communications becomes essential. As earned communications – including corporate reputation, social and creator content – increasingly influence brand equity, communications-driven media mix modeling (MMM) must be a core component of modern measurement frameworks, supplementing traditional paid media MMM. Communications efforts – whether through earned media, paid and organic creators, thought leadership, corporate responsibility initiatives, or crisis management – shape brand perception, trust, and ultimately sales in ways that traditional paid MMMs often fail to accurately represent. Traditional MMMs rely heavily on upper funnel activity data from paid channels and often retrofit similar metrics to estimate the impact of earned and owned. CM3, by contrast, starts with communications inputs – sentiment, trust, message pull-through, creator resonance – and builds predictive models grounded in comms-specific metrics. Rather than treating PR as noise, CM3 treats it as signal.
The Case for Communications-Driven MMM
The findings from The Multiplier Effect reinforce what we at Edelman DXI have long championed: brand-building doesn’t just drive long-term equity – it has a measurable, short-term sales impact through priming effects.
Our work has demonstrated that earned, owned, and creator efforts are not just about reputation – they directly influence awareness, perception and trust, all of which correlate to future sales growth. Yet, many brands fail to integrate these into their performance measurement models, which are focused on paid media.
By applying predictive analytics to earned and owned media, we can quantify their incremental impact on revenue, brand equity and even crisis resilience. Advanced MMM models – such as Edelman DXI’s CM3 offering – that incorporate PR and communications data can reveal insights into:
- How earned media sentiment influences conversion rates
- How crisis communications affect consumer trust and sales
- How brand reputation augments or limits the impact of paid media campaigns
- How media messaging and interactive communications campaigns drive KPIs such as sales, active users, brand love, foot traffic, etc.
- How trust focused communications tactics directly impact sales and highly trusted companies mitigate headwinds
Without these insights, brands risk underestimating another of their most powerful multipliers: trust.
Avoiding the “Communications Doom Loop”
The WARC report warns of a “doom loop” in performance marketing, where over-reliance on short-term metrics leads to diminishing returns and brand erosion. We argue that a similar risk exists when communications efforts are undervalued and siloed from marketing analytics.
When communications measurement is excluded from MMM, brands misallocate budgets toward lower-ROI, purely transactional tactics – undervaluing the amplifying effects of PR, social and corporate reputation efforts.
Without a measurement framework that links communications efforts to short and long-term brand equity, and in turn revenue impacts, these trust-building investments remain invisible in performance-driven attribution models. Our advanced CM3 model builds on decades of MMM research to account for complex and nuanced communications efforts via a variety of customizable methods and data.
Building a comprehensive CM3 by integrating:
- Sentiment and topic analysis from earned media coverage and its impact on trust
- Social listening insights tied to brand equity shifts
- Survey and consumer perception data to validate impact
- Creator-led campaign effects on both short term sales and long-term trust
- Interaction effects between earned and paid media performance
…enables brands to accurately measure the contribution of communications to the overall growth equation. This allows CMOs and CFOs alike to see communications initiatives as revenue-driving investments rather than discretionary budget line items.
A Call to Action: Rethinking the CMO’s Role
The Multiplier Effect advocates for breaking down silos between brand and performance teams. We believe the next frontier is integrating communications into core marketing measurement, ensuring comms and marketing organizations are in sync and multiplying each other's performance.
This requires:
- Building integrated MMM models that don’t simply account for earned, owned, and paid media independently, but also the interactions between those channels
- Adopting predictive analytics to forecast the long-term ROI of brand trust initiatives, building models that enable activation across the full marketing mix
- Redefining “performance” to include brand resilience, crisis mitigation, and long-term reputation management, given that they directly impact sales
Final Thoughts: Brand Building Begins with Culture and Earned
The future of marketing measurement lies in capturing the full spectrum of media influence – paid, owned, and especially earned. The Multiplier Effect reminds us that brand equity is a compounding asset – but what accelerates that compound growth most powerfully is culture.
Another piece of research from WARC and Edelman, Beyond the Buzz: Examining the effectiveness of Earned Media, makes clear that Earned Media is not just a distribution channel – it’s a mindset that starts with relevance, context, and cultural salience. The brands that succeed in driving long-term equity and short-term sales are those that recognize this dynamic: they don’t just advertise, they participate in culture and use earned creativity to build trust from the ground up.
The research shows that culturally salient campaigns vastly outperform others in terms of profit, market share, and ROI – even with lower media budgets. In today’s fragmented attention economy, trust and attention must be earned, not bought. This is particularly true as younger audiences increasingly look to creators, communities, and values-driven storytelling over traditional top-down brand messaging.
By embedding earned-led cultural strategy into MMM and predictive intelligence frameworks, brands can transform what they measure – and how they grow.
Reach out to Edelman DXI to explore how communications-focused predictive intelligence can integrate with your existing marketing effectiveness measurement to transform your marketing strategy.