Paid, owned and earned media
Marketers often split media into three kinds. Paid media is reach you buy: ads, sponsored posts, paid placements. Owned media is reach through channels you control: your website, your newsletter, your company page. Earned media is reach that other people give you by talking about you: an article in a trade publication, a review, a speaker's post about their session, an attendee telling their network they will be there.
Earned media is usually the most trusted of the three, because it does not come from you. It is also the hardest to put in a report. Paid media comes with a cost and an impression count. Earned media comes with neither, and that is the gap EMV tries to fill.
How earned media value is calculated
The common formula is short: EMV = earned impressions ÷ 1,000 × CPM. Impressions are how often the content was shown. CPM is the cost per 1,000 impressions you would pay for comparable advertising on the same channel, to a similar audience.
Two inputs, two sets of assumptions. The impressions are often estimated, because most earned reach happens on accounts you do not control. The CPM is a choice, ideally taken from your own ad account rather than a generic figure. The result is only as good as both, so a responsible EMV figure always comes with its inputs printed next to it.
Earned media value for events
For an event, a large share of earned media is personal social posts: speakers announcing their talk, sponsors posting their booth, attendees saying they are coming, and recap posts afterwards. Press coverage and partner newsletters add to it.
The personal posts are the hard part to measure, because each person sees the analytics for their own post and the organizer does not. So you estimate. Our partner analyses give a benchmark: 100 posts reached 250,000+ organic impressions, about 2,500 per post. Multiply your number of posts by an impressions-per-post figure you are comfortable defending, apply the CPM you would pay for LinkedIn ads to a similar audience, and you have an EMV estimate for the campaign. The event reach calculator does the same math with 2,500 impressions per post and your own CPM.
Sponsors are often the audience for this figure. They want to know whether their presence at your event was seen beyond the booth, and an EMV estimate, clearly labeled, is one way to show it.
Choosing the impressions estimate
The impression figure is where most EMV calculations go wrong, so it deserves care. Start with what you can count: how many people posted, or at least downloaded a graphic they were going to post. Then decide how many impressions an average post gets. Our partner analyses give one reference point, about 2,500 per post, but your audience may be different. A meetup for a niche community and a large industry conference do not reach the same networks.
Not every download becomes a post. Some people download a graphic and never publish it, so a careful estimate discounts downloads before multiplying. If you have real numbers from a few posts, for example speakers who share their own post analytics with you, use them to sanity-check your assumption.
Also be clear about what an impression is. On LinkedIn it counts how often a post was shown, not how many different people saw it or how many read it closely. The LinkedIn impressions entry explains the difference between impressions, unique impressions and engagement, which matters when someone asks what your EMV figure is based on.
When EMV is useful, and why it is not ROI
EMV is most useful as a comparison. If your team is weighing a paid LinkedIn campaign against investing time in organic LinkedIn marketing, it puts both on the same scale. It is also useful for sponsors and partners, who often ask what visibility they got beyond the venue, and for internal reports where marketing has to explain why personal posts deserve attention.
It is least useful when it becomes the goal. Optimizing for a bigger EMV figure leads to choosing bigger CPMs and more generous assumptions, which helps nobody.
The most common misuse of EMV is presenting it as return. It is not. EMV says what the reach would have cost as advertising; it says nothing about whether anyone registered, bought or remembered anything. A campaign can have a large EMV and sell no extra tickets.
ROI compares what you got back (revenue, registrations, pipeline) with what you spent. EMV can be one input to a broader conversation about value, especially when comparing organic and paid options, but it should never be added to revenue or called profit. If a report treats EMV as money earned, the report is wrong.
How to report EMV honestly
EMV has a reputation problem because it is easy to inflate. A few habits keep it credible:
- Show the inputs. Print the impression estimate and the CPM right next to the result. Readers can then judge it or redo it with their own numbers.
- Use a CPM you would actually pay. Take it from your own ad account for a comparable audience on the same channel. Do not pick the highest figure you can find.
- Separate counted and estimated. Downloads and posts you counted are facts; impressions on other people's posts are estimates. Say which is which.
- Keep it next to, not instead of, real outcomes. Report registrations, attendance and sponsor feedback too. EMV is context, not the headline result.
Common mistakes
Beyond calling it ROI, the usual mistakes are using one CPM for every channel, counting impressions twice when the same content is shared in several places, and presenting an estimate with false precision. A figure like "€123,456 EMV" suggests an accuracy the method does not have. Rounding, and showing a range when your assumptions are uncertain, is more honest.
Another mistake is ignoring what the figure is for. If you are deciding between spending on ads and investing in attendee advocacy, EMV helps compare the two. If you are asking whether the event made money, it does not help at all.