TL; DR
The PESO Model® has six maturity stages: Foundation, Pilot, Scale, Systemize, Real-Time, and Leadership. New data from the PESO Model® Diagnostic shows that 91% of teams are stuck in the bottom half of the ladder, even though nearly half describe themselves as “integrated.” That gap between claim and practice is the most important number we’ve seen all year.
Key Insights
- The PESO Model has six maturity stages, from Foundation (channels exist, integration doesn’t) to Leadership (the operating system itself is the brand’s competitive moat).
- 91% of communications teams who took the PESO Model® Diagnostic are stuck at Scale or below. Exactly zero have reached the top of the ladder.
- 68% of respondents claim they run PESO as a system. Every single one of them scored at the bottom two stages.
- The maturity ladder isn’t aspirational hierarchy. Different brands belong at different stages depending on lifecycle, funding, business model, and category—and that’s the point.
- The crime isn’t being at Foundation. The crime is being at Foundation while telling yourself you’re at Scale.
- Even Fortune 500 brands sit at Foundation: Oracle has the proof points most B2B brands would kill for, but every channel runs in isolation.
- Climbing the ladder is a sequence of small, structural moves.
The Six Stages of PESO Model® Maturity
A couple of months ago, I had this fun idea to build a PESO Model® Diagnostic. I had been wanting to try vibecoding, mostly to see what everyone was talking about, so I figured I would test it out with something that we could introduce to the industry.
Let me tell you what! It was so fun—and I learned a ton in the process. Vibecoding the diagnostic was the easy part. I then had to connect it to our marketing automation software and build a landing page to drop it into.
I was working on the last part of it a few weekends ago, and I completely broke our website.
Yeah, so…maybe sometimes things are better left to the experts. I had to panic call our web firm and have them restore a backup from the night before.
BUT! I got it done, and I launched that bad boy, and now we have some great data on where senior leaders, mid-market marketers, agency principals, and in-house teams—across B2B financial services, nonprofits, consumer brands, and agencies—stand in their PESO Model journey.
Ninety-one percent are stuck in the bottom half of the ladder, yet almost half describe themselves as “integrated.” And exactly zero have made it to the top.
The math isn’t mathing!
You can’t be integrated and sit at the bottom of the maturity ladder. And yet, that gap—between what teams claim and where they actually operate—is the single most important piece of data I’ve seen emerge from our work this year.
This is Part 3 of The PESO Operating System series. Part 1 argued that PESO has graduated from a framework to an operating system. Part 2 named the AI-era discipline problem that quietly undoes most teams’ best work.
Today, I’ll walk you through the six stages of PESO maturity, what each one looks like in practice (with examples you’ll recognize), the threshold almost nobody crosses and why, and how to find out where your team sits. Truly sits, not optimistically sits.
The Claim and the Practice
Most teams we talk to tell us some version of the same thing: “We do PESO.” “We’re integrated.” “We run our channels together.”
The conviction is real. The self-perception is consistent. And the data, repeatedly, does not back it up.
Here is what the data from the PESO Model Diagnostic tells us, versus what the actual scoring produced: 68% said they run PESO as a system. All of them scored at the bottom two stages of the ladder.
And there is nothing wrong with that! It’s totally normal. We discovered, when we looked at the Budweiser Super Bowl ad, that not even they are at the top rung of the maturity ladder.
The data also revealed that 47% said they were integrated across paid, earned, shared, and owned, but they were actually at the Pilot or Foundation level.
Thirty-one percent said they were fully integrated—the top of the self-rating scale. Of those, only two actually scored above the Scale level. The rest landed at Foundation or Pilot.
None of this is an indictment. The teams in the data are smart, well-intentioned, and doing real work.
The point is that integration sounds like something you either do or don’t do, when in reality it has stages. Knowing which stage you are at is the first move. Almost every team I know is one stage behind where they think they are—and that includes most of the well-resourced brands on earth.
Let’s take a look at the ladder.
The Six Stages of PESO Maturity
There are six stages of PESO maturity. They’re not aspirational hierarchy—you don’t have to climb to the top of the ladder for your work to matter. They’re an honest description of what happens inside the operating system.
Two things are worth saying before we walk through the stages.
First: this is not aspirational hierarchy. You don’t have to climb to the top of the ladder for your work to matter. Different brands belong at different stages depending on lifecycle, funding, business model, and category.
A growth-stage startup running PESO at Pilot can outperform a Fortune 500 stuck at Foundation. The crime isn’t being at Foundation. The crime is being at Foundation while telling yourself you’re at Scale.
Second, each stage has tells, looks different from the outside, and demands a different next move. The point of the ladder isn’t where you are. It’s knowing where you are and choosing the next right move.
With that, let’s look at the stages.
Stage 0 · Foundation
At the foundation level, channels exist. Integration does not. The team is execution-led, channel-organized, and cannot tell you which story is traveling across paid, earned, shared, and owned this quarter, because each function runs its own calendar—or some channels aren’t running at all.
You might be here if PESO is unfamiliar or inconsistently understood inside your team, planning happens channel-by-channel, it’s truly run as tactics from each media type, or you can’t name a single integrated campaign you ran in the last six months.
Oracle has the proof most B2B brands would kill for: a major share of the enterprise AI infrastructure market, the OpenAI cloud deal, and Cerner’s healthcare data.
But paid runs on its own, earned reacts to Larry Ellison, owned builds documentation, and shared lives in event cycles. Every channel is alive, but none supports or amplifies the others.
That’s what Foundation looks like at scale—real proof, real budgets, no integration. Four media types, four sets of KPIs, four teams that don’t work together.
Integration would mean a single thesis about Oracle as the enterprise AI infrastructure layer, with every proof point reinforcing it across all four channels and structured for answer engines.
If they did this, the work wouldn’t change, but the visibility would explode.
Stage 1 · Pilot
At the Pilot level, one integrated campaign is running. The rest of the function is not. The team has weekly cross-functional meetings, runs one initiative end-to-end across paid, earned, shared, and owned, and has probably produced a real proof of concept—but the discipline hasn’t generalized to anything else on the calendar.
You might be here if you can name a single campaign that ran with coordinated planning across all four media types, the rest of your calendar is still channel-organized, and your cross-functional standing meeting is new enough that people still remember adding it.
McDonald’s runs world-class integrated PESO when it decides to run a moment. The Travis Scott Meal, the Grimace shake, and the Wicked tie-in are the case studies everyone cites.
Paid amplified, earned wrote, owned (the menu, the app, the merch), delivered, and shared carried it everywhere. Every channel is in conversation. For about six weeks.
Then look at the rest of the year. They have the value menu, breakfast pushes, regional franchise marketing—run by separate teams, separate calendars, separate agencies, separate KPIs.
That’s Pilot at scale. Integration is the special-event mode, not the operating mode.
Integration would mean treating every week like a Grimace week (but maybe without the purple burgers?)—same coordination, same discipline, same cross-channel rhythm.
If they did this, every week would build on the last, and McDonald’s wouldn’t need to rent cultural relevance every time they launched something new.
Stage 2 · Scale
At the Scale level, integration is a behavior, not an event. The team runs multiple integrated campaigns a year, with shared KPIs across marketing and comms, scheduled cross-functional planning, and a working playbook for how paid, earned, owned, and shared move together.
Integration shows up on the calendar—but it isn’t yet operationalized as a system.
You might be here if you can name at least two integrated campaigns from the last year, you have shared KPIs across marketing and comms, your cross-functional planning is a permanent calendar fixture, but you still don’t have a dedicated integrator or a dashboard tying the four media types together.
Dove has run integrated PESO campaigns on the same thesis—Real Beauty—for two decades. Real Beauty Sketches in 2013. #ShowUs in 2019. Reverse Selfie in 2021. The Code in 2024.
Paid amplifies. Earned writes. Owned hosts the conversation. Shared carries it culturally. Every channel is integrated around the same thesis. Every two years.
Then look at the months between launches. Standard CPG marketing—product pushes, performance media, retailer co-marketing—each running on separate teams and separate calendars.
That’s Scale. The campaigns are integrated. The function isn’t there yet.
Integration would mean running Real Beauty as an always-on operating system, not a campaign that reactivates every couple of years—with shared measurement and a dedicated integrator that turns it into a true system.
If they did this, Dove wouldn’t have to keep relaunching Real Beauty. The thesis would compound—and the brand wouldn’t have to re-earn it every cycle.
Stage 3 · Systemize
At the Systemize level, integration stops being a campaign discipline and becomes a function. The team has a dedicated PESO integrator, shared dashboards tracking performance across all four media types, cross-channel attribution that influences budget conversations, and integrated planning on a quarterly cycle.
PESO isn’t a behavior anymore. It is the operating system.
You might be here if one person owns integration across paid, earned, owned, and shared as their actual job, cross-channel attribution influences resource allocation, and your team can pull up a single dashboard that shows what’s working across all four media types in a single view.
Sephora runs one of the most integrated retail operations in the world. The spine is Beauty Insider—the loyalty data layer connecting digital, in-store, and creator partnerships (which has rewarded me handsomely over the years).
Owned generates the first-party data. Earned reinforces credibility. Shared runs on creator and community signals. Paid targets off the loyalty layer. Every channel feeds the same dashboard. Every quarter.
Then look at what happens between those quarterly reviews. A TikTok trend crests and fades before merchandising can respond. A creator moment burns out before paid catches up.
That’s Systemize. The system runs beautifully on planned things, but it isn’t nimble enough to pivot or react to real-time situations.
Real-time integration would mean treating those dashboards as live instruments rather than quarterly review decks. The Beauty Insider data layer is already in place. What’s missing is cadence—in-flight decisions that turn a system into a competitive engine.
If they did this, the system wouldn’t just be smart. It would be fast. And in beauty retail, speed compounds the system’s already strong advantage.
Stage 4 · Real-Time
At the Real-Time level, the system pivots. Decisions across paid, earned, owned, and shared get made in days—sometimes hours—based on integrated performance data. The dashboards aren’t review decks; they’re live instruments. Integrated insights start influencing decisions beyond marketing—product, pricing, hiring, and content.
You might be here if you reallocate budget across all four media types in-flight, your weekly optimization meeting changes something across all four channels, and integrated performance data shows up in non-marketing conversations, such as product, content, and hiring.
Netflix runs the most publicly visible real-time PESO operation in the entertainment industry. When a show breaks—Squid Game, Wednesday, Adolescence—the whole brand pivots within days.
Paid reallocates within the week. Earned gets fed talent for the talk-show circuit. Shared activates creators overnight. Owned—the homepage, TUDUM, the app’s algorithm—reorganizes around the hit.
Every channel feeds the same dashboard. Every day.
Then look at what other companies copy. They copy Netflix’s content bets and its algorithm. They don’t copy the PESO operation behind them—because they don’t even know to look there.
That’s Real-Time. The system runs and adapts. But it isn’t yet the recognized moat.
Leadership would mean treating the operating system itself as the brand’s competitive advantage—publishing how it works, documenting its effectiveness, letting it become the named reason other companies study Netflix beyond the shows.
If they did this, Netflix wouldn’t just dominate streaming. The operating system itself would become the case study—and competitors couldn’t copy it piecemeal.
And, as Charlie Sheen once famously said, #WINNING! would become their tagline.
Stage 5 · Leadership
At the Leadership level, the operating system itself is the brand’s competitive moat. PESO mastery isn’t a marketing capability anymore—it shapes product, hiring, partnerships, and enterprise strategy.
The function is studied externally. The way you integrate becomes the named reason you win, not just the work you ship.
You might be here if your integrated PESO operation is publicly documented as your competitive advantage, other companies cite your operating model as the one they’re trying to copy, and PESO insights show up in board materials, hiring conversations, and product decisions—not just marketing reviews.
Liquid Death turned canned water into a billion-dollar brand by making the integrated PESO operation itself the product. The water is incidental. The marketing operation is the company.
Owned is brand-as-content. Earned is constant, and most of it is about the marketing itself. Shared runs on creator collabs (Tony Hawk’s blood skateboards, the Martha Stewart pact, every Steve-O moment).
Paid exists to provoke earned. Every channel feeds the others. Everyone else is watching.
Look at what other companies copy. They don’t copy the water—they study the marketing operation, the brand voice, the PESO discipline. The integrated operation IS what’s externally recognized.
That’s Leadership. The system is the moat.
The PESO Model Maturity Ladder
There isn’t a next stage. At Leadership, the work changes—from climbing to defending. The challenge isn’t getting better at integration. It’s resisting the gravity that pulls every iconic system back toward institutional Real-Time.
If they keep doing this, Liquid Death will outlast brands ten times its size—because the operating system, not the product, is the durable advantage.
When you look at all of this together, the PESO Model maturity ladder includes:
- Foundation: “Every channel is alive, but none supports or amplifies the others.”
- Pilot: “Every channel is in conversation. For about six weeks.”
- Scale: “Every channel is integrated around the same thesis. Every two years.”
- Systemize: “Every channel feeds the same dashboard. Every quarter.”
- Real-Time: “Every channel feeds the same dashboard. Every day.”
- Leadership: “Every channel feeds the others. Everyone else is watching.
It’s completely acceptable to spend years at Scale or Systemize if that’s the right stage for your business. Almost no brand ever reaches Real-Time or Leadership—and that’s not the point.
The crime isn’t where you are on the ladder. It’s not knowing where you are, or running PESO as four disconnected channels while telling yourself you’re integrated.
How to Find Your PESO Model Stage
The pattern in our data is unambiguous: almost everyone’s self-rating is one stage higher than their actual score. Resist the urge to round up.
There are two ways to find the truth. The first is a hard conversation inside your team about which stage you’re really at, using the “you might be here if” cues from each rung. Be ruthless. It’s better to discover you’re at Pilot when you thought you were at Scale than to keep optimizing for the wrong stage.
The second is faster: take the PESO Model® Diagnostic. It scores you across owned, earned, shared, paid, measurement, and integration, surfaces the gap between your self-rating and your actual performance, and tells you exactly where you’re at.
Then it tells you the next move. This is the part that actually matters.
Andi t’s free! You can take it as often as you like, to figure out how or if things have changed.
Choose the smallest possible next move—one weekly cross-channel standup, one shared KPI, one dashboard, one person who owns integration. Climbing this ladder is a sequence of small, structural moves, not a single heroic act.
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