Every channel a plan might use falls into one of three categories, by who controls it. Owned media is anything the organisation runs directly — a website, an email list, an app — where it decides what is said and when. Earned media is attention a third party gives the brand without payment — press coverage, reviews, word of mouth — attention that is credible precisely because it wasn't bought, but that the brand can't fully control or guarantee. Paid media is reach bought from a third party — advertising of any kind, on any channel — fast and controllable, but it stops the moment spend stops. This classification is widely used across digital marketing practice (see, e.g. Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2022) as a simple audit tool rather than a theory to be argued over: it asks one practical question of a channel plan, which is whether it would survive a budget cut.

That question matters because the three types fail in different ways. A plan that is entirely paid media looks productive while the budget lasts and then disappears the day it is cut, taking the audience it built with it. A plan that is entirely owned media undersells reach, since an email list or a website only reaches people who already found their way there. A plan that depends entirely on earned media is not really a plan, since a brand can influence the conditions for coverage but cannot guarantee it will happen on schedule. The discipline this lesson teaches is not "use all three" as a rule, but auditing a current or proposed plan against the three categories and asking which of them the plan is quietly over-relying on — a question Module 6's promotion decisions didn't yet have the vocabulary to ask.

Classifying channels by type doesn't yet say what each channel is for. Chaffey (Smart Insights, 2010) proposed RACE — Reach, Act, Convert, Engage — a framework that maps channel activity against the stages of the customer lifecycle rather than treating every channel as if it is trying to do the same job. Reach is building awareness among people who don't yet know the brand exists. Act covers the interactions that follow first contact — visiting a site, following an account, requesting information — short of a purchase. Convert is the point a prospect becomes a paying customer. Engage covers what happens after the sale: retention, repeat purchase and advocacy, the stage a paid-only plan is most likely to neglect because it isn't where new customers are won.

The practical value of RACE is that it turns "which channels should we use" into a more answerable question: which stage of the lifecycle is this channel actually serving, and does the plan have something assigned to every stage. A channel can serve more than one stage — a website can Act and Convert in the same visit — but a plan with strong Reach and Convert activity and nothing mapped to Engage has a gap that will show up as customers who buy once and never return, long before it shows up in a Reach or Convert metric. Mapping the Birchwater channel plan against RACE, rather than listing channels with no sense of what each is doing, is the exercise this lesson builds toward.

A channel that works well for one brand can fail outright for another, and the usual reason is that it was chosen for how easy it is to post to, not for where the target segment actually spends attention. Channel fit means matching a channel to the segment defined in Module 3, not to channels in the abstract or to what a brand's team already knows how to run. A channel can score well on reach and still be the wrong choice if the segment it reaches isn't the segment the plan is targeting.

Four questions make that fit checkable rather than a matter of instinct. Audience fit: does the target segment actually spend attention on this channel, as opposed to a different segment the brand isn't targeting. Cost efficiency: what does a meaningful result cost on this channel relative to the return it's likely to generate. Control: how much say does the brand have over the message and timing — owned channels score highest here, earned the lowest, with paid channels controllable but only while spend continues. Measurability: how clearly can results be attributed to this channel, since a channel that performs well but can't be measured will struggle to justify its budget next cycle. Scoring candidate channels against these four questions for a named segment, using Channel Fit Scorecard, turns channel selection into a comparable, defensible decision rather than a list of what seemed to work for a competitor.

A channel plan built lesson by lesson can still end up as four separate budgets that happen to share a logo, unless it is deliberately designed so that what one channel does makes the next channel's job easier. Fill and Turnbull (2023) describe this as the core discipline of integrated marketing communications: channels are planned together, with each one's output treated as an input to another, rather than planned and measured in isolation. The alternative — channels that duplicate each other's effort or that are never connected at all — is the default outcome of assigning one channel per team and leaving them to report separately.

Birchwater's plan has one integration point built into it by design: a health and wellness press campaign engineered not just to generate coverage for its own sake, but specifically to drive branded search — people searching for "Birchwater" having read about it — which the paid-search channel is then positioned to capture at the moment that search happens. The earned channel creates the demand; the paid channel exists to catch it rather than to generate interest from nothing. That is a different design decision from running earned PR and paid search as two unconnected line items that are each judged only on their own numbers, and it is the test this lesson asks you to apply to your own plan: for each channel, what does it hand off to another channel, and would removing that connection leave a gap the other channel can no longer fill as cheaply.