For years, retailers have organised marketing around three familiar categories: Paid media that brands buy, owned media they control, and earned media they hope to generate.
Dr Mike Haywood, CEO and co-founder of Brandpay, believes a fourth category is emerging – one that has been sitting in front of brands all along.
“Every brand already has a much larger network of people with genuine product experience: Its customers,” he says.
The proposition behind what Brandpay terms Customer Media is straightforward: Customers already post about what they buy, wear, eat and experience. Now, technology can enable brands to activate that behaviour at scale, measure its performance and connect it to commercial outcomes.
That changes the role of customer advocacy from something that happens around marketing to something that can become part of the core marketing mix.
“The shift is turning word of mouth into an easily scalable channel that brands can measure, invest in and scale like any other media channel,” Haywood says. “Measured like paid, trusted like earned, treated like owned.”
The changing economics of content
Several forces are converging to make that shift more significant.
The first is the changing economics of content. As generative AI makes polished brand content faster and cheaper to produce, producing more content becomes less of a competitive advantage.
“When anyone can generate polished brand content in seconds, the supply of branded content becomes almost infinite,” Haywood says. “What gets harder to fake, and therefore more valuable, is evidence that a real person actually bought something, used it, and chose to talk about it.”
That differentiation could matter as consumers increasingly use AI-powered tools for product discovery.
Instead of relying solely on traditional search, consumers are asking AI systems what to buy, which products to consider and which brands to trust. Haywood argues that this creates a greater need for independent evidence around a brand, rather than more brand-created material.
“A brand’s own content describes itself. A customer’s content is evidence,” he says.
For retailers, that makes the accumulated voice of thousands of customers potentially more valuable than the reach of a small number of highly visible creators.
A creator in every postcode
Influencer marketing has concentrated substantial spending among professional creators with large audiences. Customer Media takes a different approach, distributing activity across a much broader customer base.
“Instead of one creator with a hundred thousand followers, a brand activates thousands of everyday customers with a few hundred or a few thousand followers each,” Haywood says.
Brandpay says more than 80 per cent of the customers it rewards have between 100 and 5000 followers. Individually, those audiences may look modest. Collectively, however, they can create a highly distributed network spanning locations, communities and customer groups.
“A thousand customer posts is a distributed network of people who already bought the product, talking to people who trust them,” Haywood says. “That’s not a cheaper version of influencer marketing. It’s a fundamentally different kind of reach.”
That distinction matters because the value is not necessarily in any individual post. It is in the aggregate effect of many authentic customer voices creating repeated touchpoints around a brand. It also gives marketers measurable performance data, something that traditional word of mouth has historically lacked.
Brandpay can track impressions, CPM, CPC and Return on Reward Spend, while also connecting customer activity to subsequent spending. The company says its data across more than 250 brands includes more than 65 million organic impressions, 12,894 rewarded pieces of content and a 4.2x Return on Reward Spend.
The company says the average CPM and CPC performance to date is $2.48 and $2.62, respectively – a fraction of the typical metrics for traditional paid media, driving widespread adoption among brands and retailers that are using the Brandpay platform.
Making the economics measurable
The economic model is another important distinction. Customers earn store credit for eligible, authentic social content about brands they already buy from. They can then spend that credit back with the brand through existing payment and checkout infrastructure.
“The brand isn’t just buying reach; it’s buying reach that circulates back toward revenue,” Haywood says.
According to Brandpay, every dollar rewarded has generated an average 4.2x incremental Return on Reward Spend across its customer base, while rewarded customers return to shop roughly twice as often as customers who were not rewarded.
Haywood says the data is beginning to show how the design of a reward can impact customer behaviour, including whether the reward simply reduces the cost of a normal purchase or encourages a larger basket.
That means Customer Media is developing from a relatively straightforward advocacy proposition into an area where marketers can begin testing the relationship between reward, content, reach and revenue.
“Paid media took years to learn how to optimise bids, formats, audiences and creative,” Haywood says.
“We’re at the beginning of building that same level of understanding around Customer Media: What to reward, how much to reward, and what combination drives the best media and commercial outcome.”
Haywood urges retailers to reconsider where their next distribution source might come from, rather than replacing existing media channels.
A customer base is usually viewed as a commercial asset: People to retain, sell to and understand. Customer Media suggests it can also be a distribution asset, with thousands of existing customers potentially creating reach, content and evidence that can extend beyond the original transaction.
The technology is making that activity increasingly measurable, presenting retailers with a challenge: Turn positive customer feedback into a planned media strategy, or keep treating it as an incidental by-product of a good customer experience.
“Customer advocacy now sits on the same dashboard as the rest of the media plan,” concludes Haywood.
“It stops being something brands hope happens and becomes something they can actually invest in, forecast and scale.”
