Exactly this. All content is advertising, regardless of whether you've filed it in your 'brand' or 'acquisition' or 'paid' column.
Some good points from Bryan below:
"To many consumers, “advertising” means any brand communication. It’s all 'advertising.'"
"We talk so much about integrated communications and yet we still use share-of-voice which by definition is neither accurate (given what’s measured and what’s not) nor relevant (given what’s included and what’s not)."
"Take a legacy measure: reach. The percentage of people seeing an ad, right? Except that isn’t what’s measured. At best we’re measuring the opportunity to see an ad, whilst in the USA we don’t even get that close given the focus is on measuring the viewing to the programme and not the ad."
The measurement of audiences, the media channels to which they're exposed and their reactions to them, lags behind all the talk about integrated communications.
My piece today in The Media Leader:
https://lnkd.in/euSTwMdZ
We talk endlessly about integrated comms – then why not measure it?
https://the-media-leader.com