Next-Gen Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) represents a leap forward from its predecessor, overcoming limitations and capitalising on data science advancements. However, in order to implement it successfully, businesses need to take a strategic approach. 

This is according to martech consultancy fifty-five, whose team of international experts recently came together to discuss their top advice, for bringing up-to-date MMM into businesses who are looking for new ways to smartly reach customers in a new more privacy-focused era of digital marketing.

Dating back to the 1950s, traditional MMM operated as a ‘black box’ solution, with minimal insights into its methodology adding to its other limitations: infrequent reporting, lack of granularity and high costs. While this became obsolete with the advent of cookies and browser-based tracking, recent global privacy regulation has forced marketers to consider other options; cue the evolution of Next-Gen MMM.

In contrast to traditional MMM, Next-Gen MMM offers a privacy first approach, holistic decision-making, dynamic forecasting, deeper insights, actionable recommendations, and an accessible dashboard – plus it’s now a more cost-effective option due to advances in data science techniques since the hay-day of traditional MMM. 

While every business is different and needs to tailor their tracking and analysis tools to their needs, there is a simple four step methodology that has been identified by the team at fifty-five. Their methodology is:

1. Understand the core datasets that are most relevant for your brand and ensure their reliability
2. Use these datasets to build a fully customised, machine learning enriched set-up tailored to your requirements
3. Ensure that your model is fully transparent and, if possible, set up entirely in-house to enforce your ownership over your data
4. Integrate your internal teams into the process so that they can manage and maintain the MMM solution themselves in future

Commenting on fifty-five’s four step methodology, Nick Yang, head of media at fifty-five, said: “It is important to take each step as it comes, rather than trying to solve everything at once. Following this process should deliver actionable outputs for businesses, which can empower your team to run simulations, adapt strategies, and make informed decisions in real-time to drive ROI uplift.

“No two companies are the same, and therefore every solution should be different. Your tailored model could include anything from performance and real-time monitoring to experiments, forecasting, and scenario planning. Identifying the applications that will be most important to your organisation will shape your solution, but once you are up and running you can continuously adapt your initial set-up to take account of evolving requirements.”

Fifty-five worked with companies to customise their Next-Gen MMM, listening to their needs and challenges to define the modules that are needed and analysing the results to ensure that the model is delivering exactly what they need.