From Old-School ROI to Growth Engine: Marketing Mix Modeling’s Radical Transformation

Remember when Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) was that thing companies did once a year to justify TV budgets? Those days are long gone.

In a recent webinar with over 400 global attendees, Ipsos MMA SVP Brian Lange revealed how MMM has evolved from a backward-looking marketing metric into what he calls “a business drivers analysis” that’s reshaping how companies make commercial decisions.

Breaking the “Black Box” Myth

“MMM needed to evolve,” Brian explained. “The world was evolving, data was evolving, privacy was changing – and at the same time, the marketplace and consumer experience transformed completely.”

Today’s approach shatters long-held misconceptions about marketing measurement:

“There’s this belief – oh, Marketing Mix, that’s just a tool for the media agency or the marketing team,” Brian noted. “But no more.”

Modern MMM has expanded far beyond marketing to incorporate the full range of business drivers – creating a holistic view that aligns marketing impact with operational, competitive, and economic factors that influence business performance.

The “Bowl of Spaghetti” Problem

Modern consumers don’t follow linear journeys. As Brian colorfully put it:

“Everyone’s consumer journey, to me, the best description I’ve ever heard on that path to purchase, it’s like a bowl of pasta, it’s a bowl of spaghetti. There are no more linear journeys.”

Add multiple selling channels, dozens of marketing touchpoints, and external factors from inflation to weather patterns, and you’ve got a complex commercial ecosystem that traditional measurement can’t handle.

Today’s MMM thrives on this complexity, connecting dots across marketing, operations, pricing, and external factors to reveal what truly drives incremental sales.

Beyond Marketing: The Commercial Control Center

What makes modern MMM transformative is how it’s expanded beyond marketing’s walls. Brian shared examples of questions it now answers:

• What’s the impact of store openings vs. refurbishments?
• How do labor hours affect revenue?
• What’s the elasticity of price by channel?
• How do economic indicators influence purchase patterns?
• What happens to search volume when we launch new television creative?

“Finance teams, operations teams, real estate teams – all these different functions now have a vested interest in understanding how the business is performing,” Brian explained.

The Death of Annual Studies?

Perhaps the most practical evolution? Speed.

“The days of this being a once-a-year checkup are long in the past,” Brian emphasized. “This is now a regularly reported business tool informing choices across the landscape.”

With machine learning capabilities, today’s approach enables continuous optimization cycles: “Learning, applying, measuring, learning, applying, measuring – spinning that flywheel on a consistent basis.”

From ROI to True Incrementality

The most profound shift is the move from marketing ROI to business incrementality:

“While ROI is still critically important, more and more, especially as the conversation has moved across the full group of business stakeholders across functions, it comes to that discussion around incrementality,” Brian noted.

“What is the business experiencing that otherwise would not have happened without this investment in this particular channel?”

This focus on actual business impact bridges the perennial gap between marketing metrics and financial outcomes.

See the Transformation Yourself

Want to understand how modern MMM connects marketing investments to measurable business growth? Watch the full webinar to explore how this approach creates a shared commercial language across your organization.

This session featured Brian Lange, SVP at Ipsos MMA, in partnership with ESOMAR, the University of Georgia, MRII, and CRIC.