Throughout our careers in marketing and media we’ve always been suspicious of a black box. MMM is full of them. Many legacy MMM providers operate this way.
In fact, for some, it is part of the business model. If you’ve been involved in MMM projects client-side, you’ve likely come across it.
Too often, clients are taken through a deck with little context. Sometimes there’s not even a diagnostic. Numbers appear without a clear explanation, and marketers are left wondering:
“How did we actually arrive at that result?”
Sometimes that’s just miscommunication, but sometimes it can be masking a deeper problem with the accuracy of your modelling.
MMM is a powerful tool that sits at the intersection of statistics and strategy. However, to state the obvious, if clients don’t trust the models they don’t get used or worse they get misused.
At Entropy, we’re trying to do things differently. Yes, we bring the data science. But we also bring people who’ve sat client-side. People who know what it’s like to be in the marketer’s shoes.
Our goal is to build models that are explainable, deliver insights that are actionable, and lead to recommendations you can trust.
If your MMM provider can’t – or won’t – explain how their model works, that’s certainly a flag. And if they can’t explain it in a format that a typical marketer can understand, that’s another.
The MMM sector is going through a (very positive in our view) period of disruption. Where clients are starting to move away from these very large, often inordinately slow and expensive suppliers.
And in our view one thing that should be a leading ask in this new era are clients demanding transparency.
