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We see a lot of media mix modeling RFPs here at Recast. Unfortunately, a lot of them put a ton of emphasis on things that don’t actually matter that much to rolling out a successful MMM practice. Every MMM RFP should focus on 3 things: • Verifiability of the model The first (and most important) thing that you should be thinking about is verifiability and how are you going to validate the results are actually correct. It is trivially easy to run “an MMM”, and it is very, very difficult to run a good one. You want to ask every vendor you meet how transparent are the results going to be and how –specifically– are you going to be able to verify and validate them. What you should look for here is a way to validate the vendor’s results outside of the model itself. • Model operations You also want to think about all the operational components of your MMM. Make sure you’re asking questions like: - What's the refresh cadence going to be? - How often are you actually going to be re-estimating the model and re-estimating all of the models' parameters, or are you just re-using stale parameters on fresh data? - What's the procedure for identifying when things have changed? Beware that a lot of MMM vendors use confusing terms here or have different types of refreshes that aren’t actually refreshers… put simply, you really want to be clear on exactly what's happening. • Usability of the results Here, you want to ask questions like: - How are we going to have access to the results of the model? Is it a PDF / powerpoint? What is available in the dashboard? - How will we actually use these results in our planning workflow? - What underlying data are you going to have access to? If you want to use MMM in a fast-paced, on-demand way, great usability is what unlocks it. If every time you want something you have to ask a support question and they have to ask their team in some foreign country to pull the data, it will slow you down a lot. Whether you use Recast or not, I highly recommend you ask all these questions in your MMM RFP. Now, question for you: would it be useful if we made a free MMM RFP template you could download? If so, we’ll do it. Just let me know in the comments.
Developing Analytics That Drive Marketing Outcomes @ ScanmarQED
2moI agree a key a focus on operations (including the messy bits of data ingestion) and the exact format, structure, and transmission mechanism of the model output should be the key focus of anyone choosing an MMM vendor. I think the verification process is going to mostly rest on the "marketing analytics team" (which may, of course, just be the head marketer or may be consultants from the MMM provider) and so I am not sure I agree it belongs next to the other two. Also, of course, I would call coefficients from a model "stale." I'd call them carefully reviewed and verified! If the coefficients are changing all willy-nilly, how would a verification even work?