Marketing mix modeling is a pain in Maor Sadra’s butt.
And not only because some people have mistakenly assumed that his incrementality measurement startup, INCRMNTAL, uses MMM technology. (“We are not MMM!” Sadra states emphatically for the record on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.)
The problem is that many measurement companies are promoting MMM as an easy-to-use, privacy-safe solution to overcome signal loss – and that’s just not what it is, says Sadra, who co-founded INCRMNTAL in 2020 and serves as its CEO.
“Let’s go back to a technology from the 1950s, because that will be the solution,” Sadra says, not a little sardonically.
Of course, MMM has evolved over the past 75 years or so, Sadra acknowledges.
But the principle remains the same, which is to find a correlation between spend and performance by looking at historical data. So Sadra had some news for performance-focused app marketers and advertisers with big budgets running multiple cross-channel campaigns across countries and devices: “MMM is not for you.”
“MMM is for old-school retailers, consumer goods – stuff that moves slowly in terms of its marketing spend,” he says. “MMM was built in an era when people ran on print and radio and you didn’t do real-time optimization of creative.”
MMM can be a valuable approach to measurement, if advertisers understand what it can and can’t do.
For example, advertisers can use MMM to analyze years’ worth of historical data to quantify the impact of media on sales over the long-term time.
“But if you’re an app company that launched your game six months ago, and someone selling you MMM is like, ‘Hey, this is a solution for your iOS privacy stuff,’ that’s not it,” Sadra says.
Also in this episode: What it was like launching a company during the pandemic, why advertisers need to finally get over their destructive obsession with last-click attribution and unpacking Sadra’s theory that podcast advertising will eventually overtake CTV. Also: Sadra’s love of music. (He sings and plays seven instruments!)
For more articles featuring Maor Sadra, click here.
