What would happen if you turned off all your advertising?
It might sound like a purely hypothetical (or outright reckless) question:
What would happen to your sales if you stopped all advertising tomorrow?
For most marketers, that’s a scary thought. Advertising is seen as the engine of growth – cut it off, and surely revenue will fall off a cliff. But this question isn’t just provocative for its own sake. In fact, it gets to the heart of a fundamental issue in marketing measurement: what portion of your sales is truly incremental?
The Uber Story: A Lesson in Base Sales
You may have come across the (semi-mythical) case of Uber’s US advertising pause in 2018. The story goes that Uber halted all of its Meta advertising in the US, expecting a significant drop in performance – but that didn’t happen. The move reportedly saved the business $35 million, with no obvious impact on revenue.
There are valid caveats. Some reports suggest that Uber continued to invest in brand channels. Others note that the test may have blurred the lines between rider-side and driver-side activity.
But the details aside, the story highlights a critical point that we know to be true: not all advertising is incremental.
So ask yourself: if you pulled back on your digital, TV, OOH, or paid social spend, how much of your revenue would remain?
Why Understanding Your Base Sales Matters
Every business has a level of revenue it would achieve even if it spent nothing on advertising. This is known as your base sales – the sales you’d generate from repeat customers, word of mouth, brand equity, and general market trends and seasonality.
Understanding your base isn’t a niche analytical concern. It’s a core part of assessing media effectiveness. Without knowing what would have happened anyway, you can’t say with confidence how much advertising is truly moving the needle.
The problem is: you can’t see this from digital tracking alone. Last-click attribution or even more advanced multi-touch approaches only assign credit to clicks and impressions, not to the counterfactual of what would’ve happened without the ad in the first place.
The Hidden Risk: Base Sales Aren’t Static
Let’s say you run an experiment and cut spend on a channel, and nothing happens. It might be tempting to conclude that the channel had no value.
But base sales aren’t fixed as they can erode over time. Pull back spending for long enough, and you may see your awareness and brand equity fade. A proportion of the sales that “would have happened anyway” gradually become fewer.
That’s why understanding both short- and long-term incrementality is essential.
How Marketing Mix Modelling Helps
This is where Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) comes in.
MMM uses advanced regression techniques to disentangle your sales drivers and estimate how much revenue is due to advertising, and how much would have occurred anyway.
It can measure:
- Base sales and how they evolve over time
- Incremental impact of each channel (across paid, owned, and earned media)
- The role of non-media factors like pricing, promotions, and distribution
Importantly, MMM isn’t reliant on user-level tracking or cookies. It works on aggregated data, making it robust, privacy-compliant, and future-proof.
You can learn more about Marketing Mix Modelling here.
The Smart Way Forward: MMM as part of your Measurement Framework
Leading brands don’t stop at MMM. They use it as a powerful, holistic lens, then refine its insights through structured in-market experiments and validate with digital attribution.
For example, if MMM indicates you should increase your spend in display significantly, you can validate that by first running a geo-holdout test. If you MMM indicates your Meta ads are underperforming, use the relative performance in-platform to determine which campaigns and ads need revising.
The combination of MMM and internal testing is the gold standard in marketing measurement – but if you want to understand your base, you can only do that through Marketing Mix Modelling.
Final Thought
The question “what if we turned off all advertising?” may seem extreme – but it’s the key to understanding what your media investment is really delivering.
At Entropy, we help brands answer that question using robust, modern MMM and a pragmatic approach to measurement. If you’re ready to move beyond attribution and into real impact assessment, get in touch.
