For those of us that have worked in marketing for some time the arc towards more data, tracking and algorithms might seem to increase year by year.
Marketers can feel the strain caught between consumers who are tired of being tracked everywhere and tech stacks held together by cookie banners, consent pop-ups, and patches to compensate for disappearing signals.
And there’s something else that it is hard not to notice: measurement has become a bit of a political battlefield. Colleagues might ask why agencies are “marking their own homework”, platforms promote their own solutions, that strangely enough, often prove the case for further investment in their channels. Even when you want to do the right thing, for the curious at least, it can feel like there are elements of vested interests shaping the narrative.
Many of you will know this already of course, but it’s also why many more brands I think find MMM refreshingly cleansing when they first encounter it.
MMM offers something perhaps quietly radical: you can measure the impact of your marketing without tracking a single person and if you set it up in the right way without third party commercial agendas influencing the narrative.
There is a moment that happens in many of our new client conversations, especially with larger corporates. After we explain how MMM works and are going through the onboarding process, someone inevitably asks, “what about GDPR? We need our InfoSec team to sign this off.”
Yes as with any commercial relationship you need a contract in place with an NDA but there’s nothing for the privacy teams to review.
No Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
No consent forms. No cookie banners. No personal data processing agreements. Nothing.
Marketing Mix Modelling doesn’t track individuals. It doesn’t need to.
At no point does the model need to know that Jane from Brighton saw your display ad on Tuesday. It only needs to know that when you spent £50,000 on display advertising in Q2, your sales increased by £200,000 after accounting for everything else happening at the time.
Because MMM operates at this aggregated level, it falls entirely outside the scope of privacy regulations.
The slow death of third-party cookies hasn’t affected MMM. It has made more marketers realise what a useful solution it is for them.
More importantly, MMM forces you to think about marketing as a system or user journey rather than individual touches. You stop obsessing about last-click attribution and can start understanding how different channels work together to drive incremental growth.
The question isn’t whether you can measure without consent. The question is why you are not adding a tool to the rest of your effectiveness programme, alongside elements like in platform reporting and a structured testing programme, that can help you more effectively drive incremental growth for your business.
Mind blown? If my 10-year-old were reading this, she’d definitely say so for some.
