Cody Greco, CTO and cofounder at Prescient AI, loves working with great humans and building technology that saves them time and money.
When Bethesda released Starfield in 2023, many gamers were astonished by its attention to reality. Each of the game’s more than 1,000 planets operates according to genuine physical laws; your character experiences different gravitational pulls depending on the celestial body, light cycles vary based on planetary rotation and atmospheric conditions affect visibility and movement. It’s this painstaking dedication to replicating reality that makes the expansive universe feel authentic and believable.
This commitment to reflecting real-world dynamics should be the standard for marketing measurement tools as well, particularly marketing mix models. Unfortunately, many fall short. They operate in simplified versions of reality that marketers intuitively know don’t exist—like a video game where gravity is the same on every planet regardless of size.
For marketing measurement to provide genuine value, it must reflect the complexities and nuances that marketers already understand to be true about how campaigns actually work. When measurement tools contradict what marketers know from experience, the result isn’t just frustrating—it’s costly. Companies make multimillion-dollar decisions based on these models. When they don’t reflect marketing reality, those decisions inevitably lead to suboptimal results and wasted budgets.
The Gap Between Marketing Reality And Measurement
Most traditional measurement approaches—from last-click attribution to basic regression-based marketing mix modeling (MMM) solutions—drastically oversimplify marketing dynamics. They treat marketing channels as isolated silos rather than interconnected components. They assume linear relationships between spend and outcomes. They disregard the compounding effects of marketing over time.
These oversimplifications directly impact how organizations allocate marketing dollars. When your measurement tool tells you your awareness campaigns aren’t driving value (because it fails to capture how they influence direct traffic), you’ll inevitably underinvest in these crucial activities. When your attribution model can’t see beyond a seven-day window, you’ll optimize for short-term gains at the expense of building sustainable growth.
The most sophisticated marketing measurement should align with and quantify the realities marketers intuitively understand, not contradict them. With that in mind, we’ll explore four of the nine fundamental marketing principles that any effective marketing mix model should reflect. (The other five will come in my next column.)
Law No. 1: Funnel Dynamics
Top-of-funnel marketing drives awareness that manifests through other channels.
Every experienced marketer has seen how brand awareness campaigns drive effects far beyond their immediate touchpoints. Traditional attribution models miss the cascading effect where awareness marketing creates ripples throughout your funnel. A well-constructed marketing mix model should capture these “halo effects,” revealing how upper-funnel activities influence lower-funnel results and organic channels.
Law No. 2: Top-Of-Funnel Necessity
If you don’t spend enough on the top of the funnel, you won’t have a bottom of the funnel.
This principle seems obvious, yet many measurement approaches inadvertently push brands toward funnel imbalance. Without consistent investment in awareness and consideration, your pool of potential converters eventually dries up.
Law No. 3: Bottom-Of-Funnel Competition
If you don’t spend on the bottom of the funnel, your competition will profit from your top-of-funnel spend.
Awareness without conversion optimization creates opportunities for competitors to swoop in with targeted offers. Your measurement approach needs to recognize the symbiotic relationship between funnel stages and help you find the right balance, not push you toward either extreme.
Law No. 4: Seasonal Efficiency Fluctuations
Marketing is inherently seasonal, and marketing efficiency changes depending on the season.
Every marketer knows this intuitively: A dollar spent during Black Friday performs differently than the same dollar spent during a summer lull. Not only do impression costs vary seasonally, but so does consumer responsiveness to those impressions.
Measurement that applies consistent efficiency expectations throughout the year will inevitably mislead. Your marketing mix model should account for these fluctuations, helping you understand when to lean in despite higher costs and when to maintain presence efficiently during slower periods.
The Consequences Of Ignoring These Laws
We have five more laws to cover, but I want you to know why they matter in the first installment of this two-part series, so we’ll get to those next time. When measurement tools fail to reflect these marketing realities, the consequences extend far beyond inaccurate reports. They can fundamentally distort decision making in ways that damage marketing effectiveness.
1. Budget Misallocation: Resources flow disproportionately to channels that appear to perform well in simplistic models, regardless of their true contribution.
2. Strategic Imbalance: Critical marketing functions—particularly brand building and upper-funnel activities—become chronically underfunded when their full impact isn’t captured.
3. False Optimizations: Campaigns may be prematurely scaled back when they appear to saturate in simplified models, even when they’re actually approaching a new efficiency threshold.
4. Temporal Disconnects: When measurement ignores time-based effects, marketers optimize for immediate results at the expense of long-term performance.
5. Competitive Vulnerability: Incorrect measurement leads to gaps in the marketing funnel that competitors can exploit, essentially subsidizing their acquisition efforts.
These consequences compound over time. Each suboptimal decision based on flawed measurement pushes the marketing program further off course, creating cycles of declining effectiveness as the gap between strategy and reality widens.
These first four laws of marketing reality represent critical principles that any effective measurement solution must incorporate. However, they’re only part of the story. In the next installment, I’ll reveal the remaining five marketing laws and provide a framework for evaluating measurement solutions based on how authentically they reflect these marketing realities.
As you consider your current measurement approach in light of these first four principles, ask yourself: Does your MMM solution truly capture these marketing dynamics, or is it operating in a simplified universe where the laws of marketing gravity don’t apply?
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