8.4

Marketing Mix Modeling

A regression on aggregate historical data that estimates each marketing input's contribution to sales.

No single originator; econometric sales-response modelling from the 1960s onward

What it does

Regresses aggregate historical data to attribute sales contribution across channels. Back in favour now that user-level tracking has degraded.

When it breaks

Correlational. Uncalibrated by experiment it moves budget systematically to the wrong channel — and whoever builds the model can largely choose the answer.

Case

P&G cut over $200 million of digital advertising spend in 2017 after media modelling and transparency audits, and increased reach by 10%. Marc Pritchard reported the removed spend was largely waste, reinvested into higher-reach media.

Adweek — P&G's $200m digital cut ↗

Diagram — not yet drawn

The same sales line decomposed twice under two defensible model specifications, producing two different channel attributions — the researcher-degrees-of-freedom problem.

In the wild

Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment

What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.

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