Subject Matter Expertise (SME) is a critical component of any media mix modelling project. MMM presents a wide variety of contextual problems that must be properly understood and managed to enable a viable and successful project.
Marketing and media subject matter expertise is absolutely critical if you want to build a robust marketing mix model (MMM). It's imperative that your MMM supplier has a very strong working knowledge of how the marketing mix works, and how media channels are planned, bought and evaluated. It is imperative that the mechanics of how media channels work are properly understood. But not only that, you need to have an understanding of how the consumer responds to different types of advertising, from brand development to demand generation and demand harvesting. Without this expertise, you could have a model that is statistically robust but dangerously flawed in its conclusions. The main Subject Matter Expertise areas in MMM are discussed below.
As we are talking about marketing mix modelling, it is an absolute prerequisite that your partner properly understands the four components marketing mix, and how they can interact with eachother:
- Product attributes
- Pricing and promos
- Place / Distribution
- Promotion (Media activities and investments)
When we are focusing on media mix modelling, we your partner needs to understand:
- The differences between paid, owned and earned (POE) media
- The different types of media investment are
- How media investments work
- How media is planned
- How media is activated
- The metrics media campaigns produce
- The different ways in which media is measured
- Which of those metrics are useful in MMM
From a technical model-building perspective, it is important that your partner understands:
- The data that is required for MMMs
- The way that data has to be cleaned, checked, managed and transformed prior to modelling
- Econometric methods
- Which of these can be applied to media mix modelling
- How to evaluate and validate models
- How to estimate channel response functions correctly
- How econometric and machine learning techniques can be applied to marketing and media data
From models to actionable insight:
- Good recommendations require experience of media investment
- Your partner needs to know what is and is not possible and practical
- They need to understand how to translate model outputs into actionable insight for marketers
Any project that does not incorporate this understanding risks producing unreliable results.
I offer extensive experience in marketing analytics and data science having worked at multiple market-leading agencies and media companies including CACI, Channel Four, Ogilvy (WPP), Mindshare (WPP) as a Managing Partner, Initiative (Interpublic), where I was a main board director, mSix (WPP), and PHD (Omnicom) where I was also on the main board with responsibility for the whole agency’s analytics output.
I have been helping advertisers and marketers increase marketing effectiveness and efficiency for over 25 years.
Book a consultation now