25-07-2025
Five More Must-Know Marketing Principles For MMM Success
Cody Greco, CTO and cofounder at Prescient AI, loves working with great humans and building technology that saves them time and money.
I talked about Bethesda's hit video game Starfield in my previous article and how they managed to capture the reality of different planets; they kept the same dedication to reality when building your character's stamina, which doesn't deplete at a simple, constant rate.
Bethesda crafted a complex system where energy depletion varies based on multiple factors that don't just add together; they interact and compound, creating a dynamic system that feels authentic precisely because it mirrors the complexity of real physical exertion. We see this complexity of interaction in marketing effects as well.
In the first part of this series, we explored four fundamental laws of marketing that any effective MMM solution should reflect:
1. Top-of-funnel marketing drives awareness that manifests through other channels.
2. If you don't spend enough on the top of the funnel, you won't have a bottom of the funnel.
3. If you don't spend on the bottom of the funnel, your competition will profit from your top-of-funnel spend.
4. Marketing is inherently seasonal, and marketing efficiency changes depending on the season.
These principles aren't just theoretical—they represent the difference between making multimillion-dollar decisions based on accurate insights versus simplified abstractions that lead to wasted budgets and missed opportunities. Now, let's examine five additional marketing realities that are equally critical for measurement tools to capture and what you can do to ensure you're getting one that reflects marketing reality.
Law No. 5: Temporal Effects
Marketing isn't a series of isolated transactions—it's an ongoing process where today's activities influence tomorrow's results, which in turn affect next week's performance. Audience familiarity with your message evolves with repeated exposure. A proper measurement approach should recognize these time-based effects, accounting for marketing's impact across various time horizons and acknowledging how past activities continue to influence current performance.
Law No. 6: Variable Time Horizons
The time frame in which marketing delivers results varies dramatically by business type, product category and price point. A high-consideration purchase might show marketing effects spread across months, while impulse buys generate more immediate responses.
Sophisticated marketing mix models should adapt to your business's natural consideration cycle, recognizing that marketing impact timing is neither immediate nor uniform across brands and categories. This flexibility allows for accurate attribution regardless of whether your customers decide in minutes or months.
Law No. 7: Nonlinear (Potential) Saturation
The traditional diminishing returns curve—where each additional dollar of spend yields less incremental value—is an oversimplification of marketing reality. In reality, saturation curves often feature multiple inflection points. Seasonal factors, creative refreshes and competitor activity also continuously reshape these curves. Measurement tools that rely on simplified saturation assumptions will inevitably recommend suboptimal spend levels.
Law No. 8: Complex Decay Patterns
Marketing impact doesn't vanish instantly when a campaign ends, but neither does it decline at a neat, predictable rate. The decay of marketing effects varies by channel, audience, creative, season and competitive context.
Many marketing mix models apply standardized, predetermined decay rates to different channels (e.g., two weeks for paid social, one week for search). This approach sacrifices accuracy for simplicity. A sophisticated model should learn the actual decay patterns from your specific marketing activities and recognize how they vary across campaigns and over time.
Law No. 9: External Factors And Channel Bias
No marketing channel operates in isolation. External events affect all channels simultaneously, but often to different degrees. Similarly, changes in one channel frequently impact performance in others. The challenge is further complicated by inherent biases in platform-reported metrics. Each platform has incentives to demonstrate its own effectiveness, creating systematic biases in reported results.
An effective measurement approach must maintain neutrality across channels while accounting for these external factors. Without this holistic perspective, you can't distinguish between true marketing impact and coincidental correlation with external events.
Choosing Marketing Measurement That Reflects Reality
Selecting measurement tools that accurately reflect marketing reality requires asking the right questions:
• Does the measurement approach account for cross-channel effects and halo impacts?
• Can it identify how marketing influences organic and direct traffic?
• Does it adapt to your specific business context and consideration cycle?
• Can it capture complex saturation patterns with multiple inflection points?
• How does it account for external factors that affect marketing performance?
• Does it recognize the temporal dimension of marketing impact?
• Can it quantify the relationship between upper-funnel investment and future conversion potential?
• Can it capture the interplay between top of funnel and bottom of funnel?
The answers should align with the marketing realities we've discussed. When they don't, the measurement tool is likely sacrificing accuracy for simplicity or convenience. This isn't just about technical sophistication. The best measurement isn't necessarily the most complex, but rather the approach that most faithfully represents the marketing dynamics marketers already know to be true.
The Path Forward
The most valuable marketing measurement doesn't contradict experienced marketers' understanding; it confirms that understanding with data, adds precision to intuition and reveals nuances that even experienced marketers might miss. Like Starfield's commitment to physical reality, the best marketing measurement tools commit to marketing reality, creating a model that feels authentic because it is authentic.
Evaluating certain aspects of MMM solutions without a computer science degree can be challenging, but here, your experience is your measuring stick. Ask yourself: Does this reflect what I know to be true about how marketing works? If not, it's time to look for alternatives. Your marketing deserves to be measured in a way that's as sophisticated and nuanced as marketing itself.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
