Subject Matter Expertise (SME) is a critical component of any media mix modelling project. MMM presents a wide variety of contextual problems that must be properly understood and managed to enable a viable and successful project.
The main Subject Matter Expertise areas in MMM are as follows:
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As we are talking about marketing and media mix modelling, it is an absolute prerequisite to understand the four key components of the marketing mix
- Product attributes
- Pricing and promos
- Place / Distribution
- Promotion (Media activities and investments)
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When we are focusing on media mix modelling, we your partner needs to understand:
- The differences between paid, owned and earned (POE) media
- The different types of media investment are
- How media investments work
- How media is planned
- How media is activated
- The metrics media campaigns produce
- The different ways in which media is measured
- Which of those metrics are useful in MMM
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From a technical model-building perspective, it is important that your partner understands:
- The data that is required for MMMs
- The way that data has to be cleaned, checked, managed and transformed prior to modelling
- Econometric methods
- Which of these can be applied to media mix modelling
- How to evaluate and validate models
- How to estimate channel response functions correctly
- How econometric and machine learning techniques can be applied to marketing and media data
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From models to actionable insight:
- Good recommendations require experience of media investment
- Your partner needs to know what is and is not possible and practical
- They need to understand how to translate model outputs into actionable insight for marketers
Any project that does not incorporate this understanding risks producing unreliable results.
I offer extensive experience in marketing analytics and data science having worked at multiple market-leading agencies and media companies including CACI, Channel Four, Ogilvy (WPP), Mindshare (WPP) as a Managing Partner, Initiative (Interpublic), where I was a main board director, mSix (WPP), and PHD (Omnicom) where I was also on the main board with responsibility for the whole agency’s analytics output.
I have been helping advertisers and marketers increase marketing effectiveness and efficiency for over 25 years.