Having just watched this video, you may have thought that it was just another paid advertisement for the GoPro camera, but it is actually one of many thousands of user uploaded GoPro footage. Yes, it is earned media.

A quick scroll through the GoPro Youtube channel will display hundreds of  videos uploaded by the company showing people and even animals from all walks of life doing awesome things with their GoPro cameras – an impressive collection of GoPro’s owned media. But if you run a search for ‘GoPro’ on Youtube, what you’ll find is an even more impressive collection of GoPro’s earned media – viral videos uploaded by your (maybe-not-so) average owners of GoPro cameras.

GoPro is a tool used to creating content. The GoPro brand has become almost synonymous with the format of wide-angle point-of-view filming. Footage captured with a GoPro video are no just “caught on camera” but “CAUGHT ON GOPRO”. With that, every video filmed with a GoPro camera becomes the perfect advertisement for the the GoPro brand. Better yet, not only did GoPro not have to pay for most of these videos to be brought to the public, content creators had to pay GoPro for the cameras before they could create these GoPro videos. The brilliance of GoPro lies in the most meaningful piece of content that it owns: the wearable and mountable wide-angle style of filming. Every video filmed in this wide-angle has automatic association with the GoPro brand, every praise directed towards the content is a nod to tool that created it.

While GoPro does pay for its fair share of advertising on a variety of channels, it’s use of owned and paid of media is what transformed it from a wearable camera manufacturer to the public company it is today.