As we ring in 2026, most brands will be weighing up the usual annual budgeting challenge: how to make their media budgets stretch further and further despite inevitable media cost inflation.
The Measurement Gap Holding Back CMOs
In order to optimise media budgets effectively you need a rock solid measurement setup to understand the ROI of each marketing initiative you run. That’s common knowledge, and yet the vast majority of brands still lack an agile, integrated measurement approach. According to a recent McKinsey study, 3 in 4 CMOs plan to increase marketing budget in 2026, but only 3% of CMOs can show MROI of more than 50% of marketing spend.
The Four Pillars of Marketing Measurement
The good news: there are now clearly established best practices that indisputably boost measurement capabilities and improve ROI. Any decent piece of thought leadership on marketing measurement will tell you that you need:
- A well documented KPI and measurement framework that ladders up to business goals
- A multi-touch digital attribution solution to optimise in-flight metrics
- Incrementality studies to validate attribution results and test efficacy of new tactics
- Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) that provides a macro-level view of media ROI
Where Most Advertisers Get Stuck
Most advertisers stumble when they get to the third and fourth ingredients in measurement success. MMM studies historically take months to implement, and the most rigorous of geo-based incrementality tests can take a quarter to run. This lack of agility creates a huge time-lag between running a campaign and understanding its impact, so advertisers get drawn into the imperfect solution of real-time metrics from attribution tools that are inherently flawed.
Introducing InsightMix
So what do agile measurement solutions look like? They need to be automated, predictive, and operate at the pace that fuels rapid spend optimisation decisions (daily, weekly and monthly).
In the pursuit of this, we are proud to announce the launch of our new automated MMM solution – InsightMix.
InsightMix reduces the time it takes our teams to develop MMM models from weeks to hours, and allows us to iterate through hundreds of model variants to maximise accuracy and relevance to real-world business impact. Built on Google’s Meridian MMM library, the tool easily integrates with all media channels (including both paid and organic search) to develop channel response curves, model optimal reach and frequency scenarios, and recommend optimal budget allocation.
Early Results
Early client results are extremely promising, with each MMM study delivering results within 4-6 weeks that have validated budget shifts of 10-30% to historically under-invested in mid-funnel channels.
Given our always-on approach to testing, Meridian’s Bayesian methodology has also been invaluable in allowing us to incorporate previous incrementality test results into our models as priors and deploy these learnings into our results.
We’re also incredibly excited by the potential that AI has to further enhance this process. We’re already using an AI chatbot to run exploratory data analyses, identify anomalies and deep-dive into specific model insights. As a next step, we’ll be integrating into all platform APIs to allow re-runs of the models in real time, truly transforming the MMM process into always-on reporting.
With that in mind, make adopting agile solutions one of your new years resolutions in 2026.
