As the industry moves away from user-level tracking, capturing and measuring marketing value requires a fundamentally new approach. Signal fragmentation and degradation are the defining challenges, leaving traditional attribution models unable to cope. This has prompted marketing and analytics leaders to transition toward sophisticated predictive methodologies, including Marketing Mix Models and experiments, to maintain a competitive advantage by controlling for incrementality.
Working with clients across the spectrum, we often find a lack of confidence, if not an outright gap in attribution, that prevents marketers from applying insights to budget and channel-level optimizations.
The Strategic Anchor: Google Meridian
Google’s Meridian is a next-generation, open-source Marketing Mix Model (MMM) designed for modern marketers. The model moves beyond the black box of proprietary solutions and offers a transparent ground truth for evaluating marketing across channels.
- Privacy-Durable Modeling: Meridian mitigates the risks of signal loss by leveraging aggregated data, ensuring long-term measurement stability.
- Total-Market View: The methodology can incorporate the impact of both digital and traditional media, providing a macro perspective on how cross-channel investments drive business outcomes.
- Transparency for Stakeholders: As an open-source framework, Meridian allows for rigorous auditing and customization to improve both Analytics and Marketing leadership confidence in the underlying data science.
While Meridian provides a strategic measurement foundation, the challenge remains: how do marketers turn macro insights into performance gains?
The Execution Engine: Closing the MMM Insight-to-Action Loop
OptiPhi, a Making Science proprietary tool, is a bridge between MMM insights and marketing execution. The offering focuses on transforming open-source MMM (Meridian or others) insights into an “always-on” optimization engine. Built to complement a MMM and augment its utility, OptiPhi ensures that high-level media mix goals are reflected in attribution and can inform campaign optimization.
- Reducing Utility Latency: Traditional MMM results are often delivered quarterly or annually, making them “post-mortems” rather than real-time activation resources. OptiPhi solves this by ingesting the most up-to-date data available and performing monthly retraining. While some tools claim “real-time” updates, we’ve found a monthly cadence is a strategic sweet spot: frequent enough to capture new market shifts, stable enough to filter out daily statistical noise. The result is near real-time insights that allow marketers to pivot budgets with the agility of digital-first attribution without the volatility of over-optimization.
- Scenario Planning: Post campaign measurement is valuable, but OptiPhi empowers marketers to forecast the impact of different budget allocations. By combining optimization results from historical MMM data with OptiPhi predictive models, teams are able to simulate spend scenarios before a single dollar is committed.
- Holistic Attribution: OptiPhi goes beyond high-level media goals by evaluating how different marketing strategies work together to drive conversions. It calculates the incremental value each strategy adds to the collective results. By identifying which tactics are complementary and which are redundant, OptiPhi provides more granular, actionable conclusions.
The Value Delivered
In an environment defined by signal fragmentation, the combination of Meridian and Making Science’s OptiPhi solution provides the durability of a world-class MMM, the speed and actionability of attribution and budget planning grounded in the MMM.
Leaders who adopt a unified or “trifecta” approach to modern measurement aren’t just measuring performance; they’re using MMMs, Attribution, and Experimentation to engineer their success.
Ready to transform your macro insights into budget-level performance gains?
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