Marketing mix modeling has never been more valuable to chief marketing officers—and the need for effective models never greater—than today. Constant budget pressures and an exploding array of consumer touch points from the digital world have dramatically increased the difficulty and the competitive value of fine-tuning one’s marketing spend.

Some providers say the new multi-touch attribution (MTA) models that offer extraordinarily precise data in the digital realm can be twinned with offline data to make traditional marketing mix models obsolete. Truth be told, however, MTA’s effectiveness in modeling the offline world is still a work in progress, and most modelers today are simply choosing between using the more granular digital data of MTA models with less coverage and using the less granular data of established marketing mix models with more coverage. But the first choice doesn’t yet provide a usable answer, and the second choice fails to take advantage of the digital detail available today.

So what’s a CMO to do? Based on our analysis, the answer is to import the results of MTA models into existing marketing mix models. We call our proprietary method for doing this Intelligent Priors®. Such an approach delivers the best of both worlds, and provides the quality analytic support marketers need to make decisions about media effectiveness, efficiency, and optimization in today’s rapidly changing media landscape.