Technology advancements have transformed media mix modeling from a retrospective reporting exercise into an active planning engine.
By Willy Blesener and Prabhpreet Sidhu, Mars United Commerce
For too long, the measurement conversation in commerce marketing has been framed as a binary choice: media mix modeling or incrementality, attribution or experimentation, strategic planning or in-flight optimization. That framing misses the shift that’s actually taking place.
The real shift in marketing measurement doesn’t involve one methodology replacing another. It involves building a more connected measurement ecosystem in which each approach plays a different role: MMM remains the strategic backbone. Incrementality provides causal validation. Attribution, although less reliable than it used to be, still earns a place in real-time and mid-flight optimization.
What’s changing now is the speed, flexibility, and practicality with which these systems come together. That’s why the next chapter will be led not just by MMM, but by “Agile MMM.”
MMM as the strategic backbone
Despite all the attention on newer measurement approaches, MMM is still the strongest framework for understanding total business impact, and it’s still the best methodology for answering the questions that matter most to both senior marketers and finance leaders:
- What should my total budget be next year?
- How should I reallocate investment across channels, retailers, and tactics?
- Where are the points of diminishing returns?
- What is actually driving incremental business growth when media and non-media factors are considered together?
These aren’t dashboard questions. They’re strategic planning questions, and this is where MMM continues to stand apart.
The strength of MMM has always been its ability to look across the full ecosystem, accounting for media, pricing, promotions, seasonality, distribution, and external market dynamics in a way that no platform report or single experiment can match. In a fragmented environment where marketers are expected to justify growth across both digital and non-digital investments, this capability matters more than ever.
The industry has also moved beyond the older view of MMM as a slow, static, once-a-year exercise. Modern MMM approaches are more flexible, more granular, and increasingly designed to support scenario planning, budget optimization, and ongoing decision-making.
Incrementality delivers causality, not just correlation
At the same time, incrementality has gained momentum for a very good reason: marketers are under pressure to prove not only that performance has changed, but that marketing actually caused the change. That’s where incrementality delivers real value.
Incrementality testing helps isolate whether a specific tactic, audience, retailer, or channel truly drove a new outcome, versus simply capturing demand that would have happened anyway. In a market where every dollar is scrutinized more closely, that kind of evidence is increasingly important.
But incrementality shouldn’t be framed as a replacement for MMM; it’s better understood as a critical complement. MMM gives marketers the broad strategic view, while incrementality gives them sharper causal validation for specific questions. The two aren’t in conflict — in fact, they’re more powerful when used together.
That said, incrementality is not easy to scale. It can be resource-intensive, operationally demanding, and difficult to apply consistently across retailers, channels, and targeting approaches. Many organizations still use it in pockets rather than as part of a mature measurement operating model, which is exactly why it should be integrated thoughtfully rather than idealized as a silver bullet.
Attribution still has a role
Meanwhile, multi-touch attribution hasn’t disappeared, but its role has clearly narrowed. Signal loss, privacy changes, platform walled gardens, and the decline of deterministic tracking have reduced MTA’s reliability as a source of truth for total business measurement. It’s simply harder than it used to be for attribution-based systems to capture the full customer journey with the same confidence or completeness.
That doesn’t mean MTA is irrelevant. It still has value in the right context. For real-time optimization, mid-flight decision-making, and campaign-level performance management, attribution and platform-based signals can still provide useful directional guidance. It can help marketers understand what’s happening now, where performance is shifting, and where tactical adjustments may be needed.
So the mistake isn’t made in using attribution. The mistake is made in asking attribution to do more than it realistically can. It remains useful for tactical optimization, but it’s no longer strong enough to serve as the single measurement foundation for long-term planning, investment strategy, or total business impact.
The rise of Agile MMM
This is where the conversation gets more interesting. The future won’t be defined by MMM as we’ve known it historically. The future is Agile MMM: models that are refreshed more frequently, calibrated with stronger evidence, and used as living decision systems rather than static presentations.
Traditional MMM often struggled because it moved too slowly. By the time the model was complete, the business had already changed. Retailer dynamics had shifted, campaigns had been optimized, pricing had changed, and the market looked different than it did when the data was collected.
Agile MMM changes that dynamic, creating a more adaptive system in which models can be updated with new data, informed by experimentation, and used to guide planning in a more continuous way. Instead of treating MMM as a retrospective reporting exercise, marketers can use it as an active planning engine.
This matters because the questions asked by clients are becoming more immediate and more practical. They want to know how to reallocate budgets now, where returns begin to flatten, which channels deserve more investment, and which ones deliver inefficient spend — and they want the answers quickly enough to influence action. This is where Agile MMM has the most value.
Why the shift is happening now
Several simultaneous forces are accelerating this shift.
Marketers are dealing with more fragmentation than ever, with consumer journeys spanning retailers, marketplaces, social platforms, search, commerce media, and offline environments. No single system sees everything well. Privacy and signal loss have also changed the economics of measurement. The market has had to acknowledge that user-level visibility isn’t as stable or as complete as it once was, which has pushed the industry toward measurement methods that are more durable and less dependent on perfect identity resolution.
Meanwhile, more brands are investing in first-party data, retailer data, clean rooms, and experimentation. This creates better inputs for stronger measurement, but it also increases the need for a strategic layer that can combine these signals into one coherent view.
And underneath it all, marketers face growing pressure to prove ROI faster. Not annually, not in six months, but a lot faster. That pressure is pushing measurement away from isolated frameworks toward more integrated systems.
The future is a connected measurement ecosystem
The strongest measurement organizations won’t waste their time arguing for one methodology over another. They’ll be connecting methodologies based on business needs and time horizons:
- MMM anchors strategic planning and investment allocation.
- Incrementality validates causality for high-priority questions and major decisions.
- Attribution and platform reporting support tactical optimization and mid-flight decision-making.
- Clean rooms and first-party data environments strengthen the signal base and provide more granular views where appropriate.
The future isn’t MMM versus incrementality, or attribution versus experimentation. It’s a connected measurement ecosystem in which different methods work together, and where Agile MMM serves as the central, strategic layer that helps turn fragmented signals into better, smarter decisions.
That’s where the industry is heading. And frankly, it’s long overdue.
About the Authors
Prabhpreet Sidhu brings a technically diverse background and wealth of experience to his role as SVP-Analytics for Mars United Commerce, where he excels in delivering impactful data analytics solutions. With over 10 years of solutions architecture experience at leading organizations such as The Walt Disney Company, he has developed groundbreaking business intelligence and artificial intelligence solutions, including real-time automated measurement, multi-touch attribution, and customer segmentation.
Willy Blesener joined Mars United as SVP-Media in January 2025 to take charge of the company’s highly regarded and rapidly growing commerce media practice. His extensive background includes more than a decade dedicated to retail media, most recently with Omnicom and Flywheel helping to build the agency’s retail media analytics practice. Prior to Omnicom, Blesener worked across agencies within Advantage Unified Commerce, spearheading retail media activation and execution.
