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The myth of the single-channel win is done. It’s over. Thrown out with the illusion that performance lives in a silo.
Today, marketers must master the art of media mixing, effectively layering touchpoints across platforms, both premium and digital, to maximize a brand’s impact — like professional chefs fusing herbs and spices into their pots for maximum flavor.
In the advertising industry, it’s called Media Mix Modeling, or MMM, and though these models that use data-driven intel to inform a budget’s best bets sound like a win-win, they’re actually more of a digital-only win. Digital. Only. Wins.
Stacked in favor of online media, they are, perhaps intentionally or not, inherently biased. They lack the nuance necessary to measure the power of traditional media like print and OOH — you know, stuff that doesn’t activate the spinning rainbow wheel of death or stalk you online.
As MMMs have been stacking the deck for digital for years, there’s a lot for us to unpack here. And once you see the MMMs sleight of hand, it will be impossible to unsee it.
MMMs were supposed to be the answer to all our budget questions. Wait — you’re telling me there’s a way I can just input my data spend, adjust with external variables, and then boom — you spit out a report telling me which channel drove the 10% share of revenue last quarter? Sign me up.
Truth is, even though econometric modeling tries to take the guesswork out of which channels are driving sales, just like a pot of gumbo, the soup’s only as good as its ingredients. When it comes to digital media, the ingredients measured, while plenty and granular, are overrepresented.
Often with MMMs, reports will highlight where a consumer’s last touchpoint was before buying something. This one-touch fallacy, though not wrong, simply doesn’t tell the whole story.
Think about your commute to work. Perhaps you check your email every day amid a wrapped subway campaign by, say, Grubhub, as it tempts your tastebuds and sends your belly into pangs with Insta-feed-worthy takeout.
Come the weekend, a retargeted social ad reminds you of your cravings and you head to order online. MMMs credit only that social ad for your Grubhub purchase. The brand’s subway advertising? An unsung hero left out of the numbers.
Sure, it’s unfair, but it’s easy to understand why this happens. Beyond the correlation vs. causation discussed above, digital media is easier to track than offline media. From clicks and impressions, to scrolls and swipes, online data was made for plug-and-play reports like MMMs.
There is also recency bias, giving the advantage to channels with quicker feedback loops. Print and OOH, both of which require longer timelines to effectively measure impact, don’t compete in this race. But just because something isn’t fast doesn’t mean it’s ineffective — just ask the tortoise.
Then there’s the fraud problem. According to GeoEdge’s 2024 Ad Quality Report, “Mobile users faced 56% of malicious ads, with 68% of these attacks involving redirects.” What’s worse: More than 70% of online users consider at least half of the ads they encounter online to be untrustworthy.
In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that at least 40% of web traffic is fake. Further, a study conducted in 2023 by Juniper Research found that 22% of online ad spend that year was lost to ad fraud, with another attributing more than $125 billion lost globally.
Without digital hygiene or guardrails in place, MMMs will continue measuring fraud as performance and rewarding manufactured perception over traditional techniques and the impacts of offline media. So, the next time you get your MMM, consider carefully how much of the results is real and how much is just more smoke and mirrors.
Magazines, billboards, bus shelter ads — these analog heavyweights aren’t going anywhere. In fact, they’re experiencing a bit of a renaissance right now.
Print, the trusted, tangible, and respected medium that generations of people see suitable for framing, is enjoying an uptick in readership, with titles like The Atlantic resuming monthly print editions. OOH, ubiquitous, relevant, and omnipresent, reaches people and consumers where they’re at, with The Economist once calling the OG billboard “old but a booming ad medium.”
Unfortunately for MMMs and those who use them as gospel, offline media simply aren’t factored accurately in the econometric equation. Though proven to solidify brand trust and contribute to purchase power, traditional media are vastly undermeasured and underestimated by MMMs. Because traditional media have longer time delays between exposure and action, their true ROIs get lost in the short-term shuffle, with MMMs missing out on their gains.
But let's offer some grace to MMMs. Legacy media like print and OOH do not make it easy for even the smartest data scientists to make offline measurements metrically congruent for weighing next to social display ads or programmatic detritus.
The digital media professionals who have built the modern MMMs, now ubiquitous across agencies and holding companies, are certainly smart and capable. And if you are as well, then you just caught the most important takeaway from this article: Digital media professionals built the media mix modelers. The machine recommends you vote for the machine 🤖.
Now, we’re not saying we should throw MMMs out with yesterday’s click-through numbers. Their data is valuable. But we need a better model — one that accounts for and reflects how customers truly behave with all the media surrounding them.
To do this, MMMs need to address the following:
MMMs aren’t perfect. More blinders for bias than tools for insight, they simply miss out on painting the broader picture. Yes, digital is sexy. It’s now. It’s vital to this industry. But it isn’t the end all, be all.
Print and OOH remain industry stalwarts, forever enduring economic changes and culture shifts. Let’s give them the credit they deserve with an MMM that allocates budgets to channels that actually move consumers regardless of if they have a Wi-Fi signal.
