Marketing

How MMM improves your media effectiveness, both online and offline

Written by :
Manoj Tadepalli

Marketers are faced with ever increasing competition, which has led to a new level of pressure on advertising to deliver the goods. As opposed to being a nice thing to do, it has now a crucial for a company’s success. Add the complexities of the newer media online, with their ever changing rules, the problem needs attention. How much to spend on online vs offline? How can one evaluate the success of a media strategy?

With access to PII(personally identifiable information) frowned upon by authorities, the attribution models are more flawed than ever. So marketing departments are turning to a tried and tested approach – Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). MMM does not need PII, works with aggregate data across both online and offline and can optimize the whole mix, and not only digital as existing attribution models have been doing.

How does MMM add value to media deployments? Basis time series data, MMM is a regression based statistical methodology that allows us to capture the effects of all variables that lead to changes in sales. The variables can be market factors such as economic growth or decline, competition intensity or internal factors such as distribution, price, promotion, base residual equity and of course media. As opposed to other methods, as MMM takes as many variables as possible into the analysis, chances of misattribution are greatly reduced. This makes the methodology robust when it comes to getting insights especially into media.

MMM can take media variables at different levels to estimate their effectiveness. It can be at the media type level – TV, Print, Digital Media, Out of Home, In-store media, Mobile. This apart newer MMM methods can give insights at a more granular level, for example at a genre level (Sports vs News Vs General Entertainment)for TV or at a platform level for digital – FB vs Google vs Instagram or indeed Video vs Still creative units. Marketers can use these insights to improve the Return from Investment (ROI) for media.

(RainMan is an expert MMM consultancy that has helped over a 100 brands with ROI, Promotional and pricing analytics over the last 15 years. Check out www.therainman.infor more details)