Struggling to determine which marketing activities are actually driving profit for your business? You’re not alone. Marketers across industries experience this challenge. Enter Media Mix Modeling (MMM), an approach that measures media’s business impact using sophisticated analytical techniques. It’s a powerhouse tool that marketers can use to plan and manage their media. But like any tool, what you get out of an MMM depends on both the tool’s quality and how it’s used. 

Not all MMMs are created equal – and MMM partners even less so. The true power of an MMM is found in the combination of the tool and the people who use it. If you’re considering introducing an MMM to your organization or looking to upgrade from your current tool, choosing a partner requires careful consideration. With this in mind, let’s explore the three key questions that will help you choose the right MMM partner for your business.

1. How Customizable Is It to My Business?

Your MMM should tell you what effect marketing activities have on your primary business objectives. If your MMM is only modeling a fraction of your marketing activities or key outputs, it might not be useful for achieving your enterprise goals. To ensure your MMM will generate relevant business insights, consider the following: 

• Media channels. Which media channels—including traditional and owned channels—does your business use? Can your MMM measure all of them? How customizable is its taxonomy? 

• Customer journeys. What sales channels generate revenue for your business, and what are the critical touchpoints in your customers’ journeys? Can your MMM address all those channels? How does it connect online and offline activity?  

• Lines of business. Do you have multiple brands, banners, or lines of business (LOBs)? How will your MMM help you understand each of them individually and all of them together? 

• Metrics. What primary metrics (e.g., Enterprise Marketing Revenue (EMR), revenue, profit, customer acquisition or retention) and secondary metrics (e.g., subscribers, applications, traffic, leads, AOV, customer lifetime value) are most important to your business? Can your MMM speak to those metrics?  

• Incrementality. How much of your revenue is driven by marketing? For many organizations, it’s just 20%. How clearly—and at what level of granularity—does your MMM reveal what activities are driving revenue? Does it help you understand both short-term and long-term business drivers?  

If your MMM can address the full scope of your marketing activities, customer journeys, LOBs, and key metrics—and if it will clearly show you marketing’s causal impact on the business—then it has the potential to help you drive growth.

2. How Long Will It Take to Launch My MMM?

While it may seem straightforward to ask a partner how long it takes to go live, MMM partners use different definitions of “live.” To avoid frustration and missed expectations, develop a complete and accurate implementation timeline by asking partners these questions:

• What needs to happen before implementation can start?

• What functionality will go live first? How long will that take?

• How long will it take to complete everything? When does the clock start ticking?

• What are historical actuals from real clients? How complex were those implementations?

3. How Frequently Will I Receive Reporting? What Will That Reporting Include?

Even if your MMM checks all of the boxes above, it won’t help you drive your business unless its results are fast, frequent, and trustworthy.  An MMM partner shouldn’t just be installing a box; they should be helping you stand up a new set of analytical capabilities and deploy them into your organization. Understand your partner’s ability to advise you as a thought partner by asking questions like: 

• What stakeholders should we educate as we stand up an MMM? How can we build their confidence and trust? 

• How often will you provide results, and how quickly after actuals? 

• How will you deliver results? Can you share examples of the insights and recommendations your tool and team provide?

• How frequently will we talk with your team? Who will support our business?

• How explainable are model outcomes to leadership? How will you validate whether decisions resulted in better or worse outcomes?

What’s Next? Set Up a Modern MMM with Ovative

We get it. Choosing an MMM partner is a complex decision. It’s a commitment to working together to forge a new measurement path. It’s not an easy thing to do, but when done right, it can be truly transformative for your business. That’s why asking these questions before committing to one partner is so necessary. 

Ovative Group’s Modern MMM provides the most comprehensive view of your marketing program, unlocking incremental revenue and customer potential. It’s the only Media Mix Model that: 

• Seamlessly integrates MMM, MTA, and Customer Models to provide a unified view 

• Is highly customizable and capable of generating actionable insights weekly 

• Is purpose-built to measure EMR 

• Ingests in-market test results to improve models 

Want to put us to the test? Connect with Ovative’s measurement experts to learn more about our unified marketing measurement tool.