The new measurement frontier: Turning ‘obsession’ into advantage
Yesterday afternoon, Mumbrella published a piece from Jen Davidson on the marketing industry’s “dangerous obsession” with market mix modelling. Henry Innis, co-founder and CEO of marketing effectiveness platform Mutinex, says the debate feels like 2010, not 2025, and makes an argument for what he says is “a simulation environment”.
"What the industry needs now is a more mature relationship with measurement": Henry Innis
There is a pattern that repeats itself in marketing whenever uncertainty rises. The ground shifts, the signals get noisier, and teams reach for frameworks, dashboards and models to make the world feel legible again. Right now, market mix modelling is the thing everyone is reaching for.
Jen Davidson is right to warn that any model becomes dangerous when it is treated as the strategy rather than one of its inputs.
The interesting question is not whether MMM is perfect or flawed. It always has flaws and always will. The interesting question is what kind of measurement system lets leaders make braver, more accountable bets in a world where uncertainty is permanent, not episodic.
Round one to Davidson on my card
The alternate assumption could be that the new measurement frontier may be turning obsession into an adage.