“To some extent, what's happening now is that more weight is being shifted toward MMM because it can compensate for where data is lacking. The MTA side is not going away. There's still a lot that can be done, especially around first-party identity graphs that are available, but the MMM side plays a bigger and bigger role.”.

Also commonly called MMM or a top-down model. Unlike many digital attribution models, marketing mix models look at channel contributions at an aggregate level. Reporting is also less frequent than for digital attribution; many consult these models quarterly or yearly. Models may incorporate digital marketing data, but it is often added in aggregate.

You need multitouch attribution to measure and optimize at a granular level, and then you need MMM to measure those influences that affect consumers on a much slower time period, or things that might not be observable at the individual level with the variance you need.”.

Our two-part attribution series focuses on holistic attribution. It explores best practices for implementing attribution at the organizational level and balancing channel- and company-level KPIs.

MMM is broken! How can last year's data possibly be helpful to predict changes in behavior and adjust course during a pandemic? MTA is dead! You can't do user-level measurement without third-party cookies or mobile ad IDs. It’s time to get past all these misconceptions—absolutists always fail to see the big picture.

Companies may know that more advanced attribution practices are needed to prove marketing value in today’s complex media world, but that doesn’t mean they understand, or easily embrace, these practices.

What companies really require to see the full customer journey and capture both online and offline marketing effects is a blending of MTA and marketing mix models (MMM). Some companies call this unified measurement, while others call it holistic attribution. Regardless of what it's called, solutions providers are improving their capabilities to attribute across the full O2O view.