My new column is live in The Drum:
Is Google’s MMM platform Meridian a gift to marketers or another dead end?
Google has unveiled a new marketing mix modeling (MMM) platform. Can marketers afford to trust it? Can they afford not to? And what are the wider ripples of the launch? Sam Scott explores as part of The Promotion Fix.
Is Google’s new open-source marketing mix modeling (MMM) platform, Meridian, a company product? Or are the marketers that use Meridian the product?
I will answer that question and more, but first. Say that you sell candy bars. You change the price that you charge retailers. You run various ads over several channels. You move them to different shelves in supermarkets and corner stores. You know that local economies have varying levels of strength. So, which variable – or which several – affected sales volumes and profits? And how?
Now, imagine that you sell B2B enterprise software. A sales cycle might take years. People might see you at a conference. They might have searched Google for your type of product. They might have read the sales collateral and enablement material on your website. They have talked to salespeople. So, what gets the “credit” for an eventual sale?
The likely answer?
Many or most of those things – to one degree or another.
For a generation now, “digital” and “performance” marketers have fallen for the lie that the “attribution” that we see in online analytics dashboards means something useful. But no one buys anything because of one ad that they see one time. The real world does not function in a linear, neat, and straight line.
In fact, my hours-long effort to get Oasis reunion tickets showed Twitter as the “source” of my purchase despite the fact that I have wanted to see the band for around thirty years.
So, what should marketers do?
As I wrote in a prior column that included a lengthy interview with Les Binet, the former group head of effectiveness at Adam&EveDDB who recently became a private consultant, they should enter the world of marketing mix modeling (MMM) – also called econometrics.
And now, Google has joined that world as well.