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.

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A lot of the current debate I read reacts to a picture of MMM that looks more like 2010 than 2025 – a static regression on last year’s media spend that spits out a single “optimal” mix and quietly nudges everyone in a category to the same answer. If that is your mental model, of course it feels reductive and hostile to creativity. 

The frontier looks very different. Modern measurement is moving in three important directions. 

Traditional MMM was built on a sparse set of inputs: media spend, a handful of dummy variables, maybe a macro index. It could only........

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