⭐️ Meta held an MMM event yesterday in London, focusing on cross-channel media measurement.
Our CEO Juha joined a panel discussion with folks from three other MMM companies: Kraz, Recast, Fospha.
To me, the most interesting parts in panel conversations are the ones where panellists express truly differing opinions. This time the question with most controversy was: "Is MMM relevant for small advertisers?"
I have a clear point of view to this (YES, IT IS RELEVANT!), but let's look at some of the counterarguments I’ve seen on the topic:
1️⃣ "Small advertisers won't get value from MMM because their spend level is too low and media mix is too simple "
This belief comes from the limitations of legacy MMMs. Let me explain what I mean. Majority of MMM's value is realized when an advertiser makes budget re-allocation decisions, which can be done on multiple levels, for example across
- Ad platforms: ("Meta vs Google")
- Campaign types: ("FB prospecting vs. FB retargeting")
- Campaigns ("FB campaign X vs FB campaign Y")
Legacy MMMs’ challenge is that they operate on a high level, meaning that their focus is on "Meta vs Google"-level comparison. For a small advertiser, who might only have Google and Meta in use, it could be that this level of analysis is not valuable enough compared to the effort. But since modern MMMs provide campaign-level ROI tracking, even a small advertiser with 1-2 ad platforms can get value from MMM by doing in-platform budget re-allocation across campaign types and across campaigns. This means that MMM can be relevant even for advertisers with less than 1M€ annual media spend, like some of our customers do.
2️⃣ "Small advertisers typically don't have enough resources to allocate to MMM to do it properly"
The resource need for MMM used to be high when automatic data connectors or automated data processing didn't exist. Sure, you still need bandwidth to drive actions from the results, but automation in modern MMMs has dramatically reduced the need for resources in data collection, data cleaning, modeling etc.
3️⃣ "Small advertisers are fine using ad platform’s own attribution or Google Analytics 4"
Unfortunately, these tools have such strong biases that advertisers will end up wasting money. If your cross-channel budget optimisation is based on GA4 last-click, you will have a media mix which has lots of lower funnel media, like branded search, and very little upper funnel media, like paid social. If you use ad platform attribution for optimizing spend between prospecting and retargeting campaigns, you will overemphasize retargeting to your existing customers because the attribution captures so many conversions from your existing customers that would happen even without marketing.