Why MMM is the Gold Standard

Marketing mix models are powerful tools that allow marketers and brands to understand marketing performance and make data-driven decisions to drive business results. Most marketers are familiar with mix models and may have been disappointed in the past with various aspects of their projects. Mix models have an (often deserved) reputation for being slow to deploy, inflexible, and too focused on information rather than application. 

Today’s cutting edge mix models have moved far beyond those limitations and offer unique and powerful capabilities. Those unique capabilities make mix models the gold standard for cross-channel marketing attribution and optimized, data-driven strategic planning.  We believe there are 4 key factors that make mix models superior to other measurement, attribution, and planning tools: 

1. Marketing mix models give marketers data and facilitate decisions that no other approach can match in a single tool: 

• Mix models are wholistic: Include all your marketing regardless of data source and join that up with competitive marketing, external factors, trade, distribution, and any other variable that affects your business. 
• Mix models are predictive: They can be extremely accurate without onerous data requirements. 
• Mix models are actionable: Get specific recommendations that can be activated to improve marketing performance.  
• Mix models are flexible: They can be tailored to the needs of the project, whether that means more marketing granularity by campaign / partner to focus on tactical optimization or a greater focus on scalability and marginal profit for a growing brand.

2. Marketing mix models aren’t black boxes. They’re simple to understand and explain to your clients, giving clear outputs describing: 

• How each marketing channel scales with increased or decreased investment. 
• How performance changes with CPM / cost to execute. 
• The impact of shifts in external / economic factors on business results. 
• Overall business results, rather than only channel results. 
• Model performance over time and opportunities for improvement. 
• Specific reasons performance changes over time. 

3. Marketing mix models are easy to implement for client teams and they evolve over time with your requirements and your marketing strategy. 

• Simple attribution approaches work out of the box but don’t give you actionable outputs. 
• Cross-channel attribution approaches take months of setup and expense and generally still don’t give you actionable outputs. 
• Mix models are channel and platform agnostic, have reasonably simple data requirements, don’t require tagging or direct attribution, and aren’t limited by walled gardens or other digital barriers.

4. Mix models are proven, respected, and widely employed across industries. 

• Executing media without data driven planning is leaving money on the table in 2024. 
• Deploying mix models and integrating the data they produce into the planning process routinely results in 20%+ increases in marketing contribution and ROI. 
• The opportunity cost of profitable revenue nearly always far outweighs the cost to implement and maintain these projects. 

Today’s mix models are innovative, flexible, and recommendation focused. Our models use state of the art technology to ensure they give our clients what they need when they need it: 

1. Granular data inputs at channel or sub-channel level. 
2. Macro and external factor impacts across a variety of inputs. 
3. Probabilistic outputs quantify risk and uncertainty. 
4. AI integrations to fine-tune model development and identify insights / outliers. 
5. Embedding model integration to greatly widen and simplify the inclusion of key non-marketing inputs like distribution, promotions, trade activity, and holidays. 
6. Embeddings help models understand how related factors perform relative to each other and allow modelers to increase the number and variety of factors that are included in the analysis. 
7. Affordable, quick-turn solutions that allow brands and marketers to get data driven, scalable metrics and employ performance driven planning with minimal investment. 

Marketing mix modeling might seem old school in 2024, but for marketers that want to employ data-driven, strategic, and forward-looking strategies for their brands it remains the best and only option. Couple that with unmatched data flexibility, predictive capabilities, scalability of media, and optimization and see why mix models remain the gold standard for proactive, data-driven marketing planning that maximizes performance and ROI.