In-housing Marketing Measurement & Optimization: the benefits

What are the benefits of in-housing MMO?

Internalizing MMO provides companies with control of and direct access to all of the marketing performance data that matters. Marketing and analytics teams working with third-party analysts can waste a huge amount of time and effort because they have to prepare, cleanse, and harmonize data from multiple agency groups, platforms, and publishers. Building long-lasting MMO capabilities in-house gives you control of your data and your data lake becomes the single source of truth.

This enables global, regional, and national teams to run MMO analyses more often, more quickly, and with more impact. With MMO in-housed, companies start to factor optimization analyses into every key decision-making point in the year. Having fresh results whenever you want provides always-on optimization and forecasting capabilities, customized to your business needs and timetable. Reporting is based on corporate requirements and this approach is also much more cost-effective in the long-term than relying on external service providers for delivery. In-housing makes MMO always-on and marketing investment ever-more flexible and responsive to consumer behavior and competitor activity, as well as much more cost-effective. Being always-on makes MMO more agile, bringing it closer to the needs of the business.

By internalizing MMO and building fit-for-purpose solutions that are under their direct control, one benefit that organizations can obtain is to decrease their dependence on third-party ‘black box’ models for marketing measurement and optimization. With direct control over the architecture and alignment of data and models built to analyze this data within their own IT environment, businesses benefit from greater transparency in both data modeling and analytics processes. This facilitates optimization undertaken with eyes wide open. By bringing MMO in-house, you increase the usage and the speed of usage of customer and marketing performance data.

One size clearly doesn’t fit all when it comes to in-housing MMO, but the evidence from the market is that a hybrid approach is probably best. Depending on the size of the company, its scale of investment in marketing, and the number of brands it sells in different markets across the world, in-housing MMO demands both time and investment. It can take a couple of years or more for an internalized operation to start saving a company serious money, but once MMO has become an integral part of your culture, the savings can be progressive, incremental, and accelerated. It can deliver increased ROI at scale with reduced investment, giving you greater control over a key part of your marketing budget.

Once MMO is embedded in a business, it becomes one of the principal drivers of increased marketing efficiency and effectiveness. With direct control over the data that matters in your own environment and IT infrastructure, you manage your own road map better. These benefits obtain for companies that take a hybrid approach, too. It can make you money and enable you to grow your business at scale, delivering competitive advantage through data valorization: transforming and analyzing your own data into information that drives value.

What should companies ask themselves to assess readiness to in-house MMO?

• Do we already have some experience with MMO?
• What are our expectations of the in-housing journey and why are we launching this program?
• What is our current level of data maturity, both as an organization overall and as regards MMO in particular?
• Do we spend enough on marketing to make it time-effective / cost-efficient to in-house MMO?
• Are we ready to start on a multi-year roadmap to invest for the long-term future?
• Do we have C-level endorsement and support to see the process of internalization through?
• Are we prepared to build MMO into our decision-making at key moments of the marketing investment calendar?

Getting going with in-housing MMO

The first step on the road to internalizing MMO is to talk to an external expert with rich experience, both in the what and the how of the discipline per se and in helping businesses in diverse industry sectors to in-house this increasingly important function. Although most of today’s CMOs are becoming much more comfortable with data and modeling – from exposure to digital attribution, web analytics, and MMO – third-party experts can provide invaluable help in driving and designing always-on, in-housed solutions that industrialize MMO across all key decision-making moments.

In-housing MMO goes well beyond creating a culture of advanced analytics inside a business. It delivers data maturity right up to the level of the C-suite, evolving the use of data, analytics, and technology in ways that bring about a genuine transformation and lead to competitive advantage. In-housing MMO – most likely in a hybrid model – can really shift the needle.

Ekimetrics has recently published a white paper on in-housing MMO. In March 2022, our Global CEO, Jean-Baptiste Bouzige hosted a webinar on in-housing MMO in partnership with Forrester. To read the Executive Summary and download a copy of download a copy of Ekimetrics’ White Paper, click here.  

 Other articles in this series consider where to start with in-housing MMO and what’s involved. You can access them below:
ekimetrics.com/article-insights/in-housing-marketing-measurement-optimization-where-to-start/

ekimetrics.com/article-insights/in-housing-marketing-measurement-optimization-whats-involved/