What’s the impact of Robyn & Meridian on MMM?

As Meta & Google have moved their positioning to recognise that MMM, not last click attribution, is the “gold standard of marketing measurement”. What will be the impact on marketing measurement of their open-source MMM packages?

Short term: The market has grown exponentially

It’s hard to say whether Meta and Google led the charge or were simply following a trend, but what’s clear is that in recent years, brands have moved away from last-touch measurement in droves.

MMM and experimentation have been the tools that teams have scaled at pace. CMOs & CFOs are now more than ever focused on marketing's incremental impact.

Medium Term: Price vs Quality

As more brands adopt MMM, the execution challenge becomes the focus.

For businesses with in-house analysts and data scientists, the allure of open-source software has been strong. Many teams have tasked themselves with building MMM models internally, and while there are certainly success stories, this approach often faces significant hurdles.

Common challenges include difficulties in implementation and, in many cases, concerns about model quality. The reality is that effective MMM requires not just data science expertise, but also thinking like an economist – yet too often, teams only bring the former.

External providers remain a viable option, but they’re often expensive, with a consultancy-driven approach that emphasises quality delivery. These providers typically have there own modelling infrastructure, so open source tools aren’t relevant. However, this approach frequently lacks the speed, simplicity, and access to real-time data that made “last-touch” measurement so appealing.

Long term: Scale for all brands

The push for incremental measurement is here to stay. To scale beyond just enterprise brands (i.e. those that can afford it today) I firmly believe that the “Price/ Quality continuum*” needs to better align.

That's why we built the Linea measurement platform to help scale incremental focused MMM to scale-up & scaled Brands. For Enterprise brands, the push to automate will allow more frequent incremental measurement.

Open source MMM packages might not be the solution, but have triggered a move where brands of all sizes should get fast measurement & an ongoing view on the incremental impact of marketing.

*Yes, we call it a continuum. Do we fully know what that continuum means? No, not really.