Recast’s MMM uses Bayesian statistics, but why doesn’t everyone else? We asked this to Recast’s co-founder Michael Kaminsky, and the rest of this article covers what he answered: “When I started my career as an econometrician, I was pretty comfortable with the frequentist methods that people who did a technical …
The central modeling challenge for an MMM is the following: given any set of marketing inputs (budget decisions, promotion dates, new product launches, etc.) to be able to accurately predict what our customer’s performance will be. But, how do we judge our model’s ability to meet this challenge? How do …
Today, we introduce the Lift Test Calculator – an open-sourced tool designed by Antonio Vargas, a senior data scientist at Recast. The Lift Test Calculator was created to address the gap in the way lift tests are conducted and interpreted. Antonio and the Recast team recognized that marketers often ran …
Recast’s Lift Test Calculator [Download + Video Walkthrough] Read More »
Your marketing performance doesn’t live in a silo and it’s not independent of external factors. One of those that will impact it is GDP (gross domestic product). But that brings many questions to marketers: If our marketing is doing well during a period of GDP growth, is it because our …
Why You Need to Stop Controlling for GDP Growth (and what to do instead) Read More »
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is hard. The core difficulty is that MMM is trying to solve a causal inference problem where there is no ground truth to compare the model results with. There is no ground truth source that can tell us what the true incrementality of TV is as …
MMM is about Causation not just Correlation At the highest level, the idea behind MMM is to look at the correlation between marketing activity on one side and business results (revenue, new customers, leads, etc.) on the other. However, we don’t just want correlation. We want to actually estimate causation, …
Updated: August, 2024 Many brands want to know what the long-term effects of their marketing efforts are. The theory is that advertising today may boost brand awareness, which in turn, might have long-term positive impacts for the business. Wanting to understand these long-term effects is good and important. However, measuring …
Why “Brand Effects” are so difficult to measure in MMM Read More »
Occasionally, prospective customers react with shock when we tell them that we don’t “control for the COVID pandemic”. “The pandemic really impacted our business, so how can your model be accurate if you don’t control for Covid?” they ask. The answer is simple: Recast models changes in the macro-environment, but …
Elon Musk believes we live in a simulation. His argument goes: “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality” — Elon Musk, Founder PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX What are the chances someone beat us to it? With the potential for many simulated realities, …
Introduction Note: this post was developed in partnership with Mike Taylor over at Vexpower where they’re working to educate marketers on how to do effective media mix modeling. This post gets a bit into the weeds, so if you want a more straightforward overview, definitely go check out the companion post over there. Bayesian …
