Why Your MMM Platform Is More Valuable In Uncertain Times

Marketing budgets are often first on the chopping block when times get tough. As a marketing leader, you’ve probably sat in that uncomfortable meeting where you’re asked to identify places to cut costs. It’s tempting to look at your tech stack and start eliminating tools that seem like “extras.” But before you put your marketing mix modeling platform on that list, take a step back.

As Andrew Ford famously said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” The same wisdom applies to cutting your marketing mix modeling (MMM) platform. You might save a line item in your budget, but you’ll lose the very tool that ensures the rest of your marketing dollars are working effectively.

Here’s why your MMM platform—especially one like Prescient AI—should be the last thing you consider cutting when budgets get tight.

Reason #1: MMM is your insurance against wasted ad spend

In uncertain economic times, every marketing dollar needs to work harder. But how do you know which dollars are pulling their weight and which ones are essentially being thrown away? That’s exactly what your MMM platform tells you.

Prescient’s dashboard provides critical insurance by revealing the true value of your campaigns through halo effects—showing you which initiatives are crucial to preserve when budgets tighten. This goes far beyond surface-level metrics to uncover:

Upper funnel campaigns that efficiently drive new customers and revenue, not just awareness
Mid and lower funnel campaigns that might be taking credit they don’t deserve
How similar-goal campaigns across different channels perform dramatically differently in terms of actual revenue generation

Without this deeper understanding, you might cut the very campaigns that are silently driving your business forward while preserving underperformers that look good in platform reporting.

As a secondary layer of protection, Prescient’s detailed saturation curves show you exactly where campaigns are hitting diminishing returns. These aren’t generic insights—they’re tailored to your specific campaigns and channels. The platform reveals which campaigns have peaked in efficiency and which still have room to scale.

Think about it this way: if your MMM platform helps you identify just 10-15% of inefficient spend in a $1 million budget, it’s already paid for itself many times over. And that’s being conservative—many marketers discover much higher percentages of their budget that could be better allocated once they have the right data about both direct impact and halo effects.

Your MMM platform isn’t just another expense—it’s the guardrail that prevents your other expenses from going to waste while ensuring you preserve what’s truly driving business results.

Reason #2: When competitors cut spend, your MMM becomes your secret weapon

Economic downturns affect everyone—including your competitors. When market conditions tighten, many of them will inevitably cut their marketing budgets. Some will do this strategically, but many will make across-the-board cuts without the data to inform these decisions. This creates a unique opportunity for brands that maintain their marketing intelligence capabilities.

When competitors begin to pull back from paid media channels, the cost of advertising often decreases as demand for ad inventory falls. At the same time, share of voice becomes easier to capture. With less competitive noise, your messages have a better chance of breaking through and making an impact. But which channels should you focus on? Which competitors’ retreats should you capitalize on? Your MMM platform provides these critical insights.

Prescient’s daily-updating models can quickly detect shifts in campaign performance as the competitive landscape changes. This allows you to spot emerging opportunities faster than competitors who are either flying blind or relying on outdated or incomplete data. You can see which channels are delivering better results as competition decreases and double down on the areas with the highest potential returns.

In marketing, as in many competitive arenas, the greatest gains are often made during challenging times when decisive, data-driven action separates leaders from followers. Your MMM platform gives you the confidence to make these moves when they matter most.

Reason #3: It turns marketing from a cost center into a profit driver

One of the most powerful aspects of an advanced MMM platform is its ability to reframe how marketing is viewed within your organization. Instead of being seen as a cost center, marketing can demonstrate its direct contribution to revenue and profitability.

Prescient’s platform goes beyond simple attribution to offer optimization and forecasting capabilities. The Optimizer tool specifically shows you where to reallocate budget for maximum returns, helping you make data-driven decisions about where to invest more and where to pull back. Rather than making these decisions based on gut feeling or platform-reported metrics (which we’ll discuss more in a moment), you’re using objective analysis of what actually drives revenue for your business.

The platform also helps quantify aspects of marketing that have traditionally been difficult to measure, such as:

The halo effects of your campaigns on organic traffic
The impact of top-of-funnel marketing on your bottom line
How your marketing on one channel affects performance on others (like how non-Amazon marketing impacts your Amazon store performance)

These insights allow you to speak the language of the C-suite, connecting marketing activities directly to revenue outcomes. In budget discussions, this transforms marketing from a department that “spends money” to one that “generates returns”—a crucial distinction when resources are tight.

By providing this level of clarity and business impact, your MMM platform doesn’t just help you optimize campaigns; it helps you demonstrate marketing’s value to the organization in terms executives care about most.

Reason #4: It’s the unbiased referee among platform-reported metrics

If you’ve ever found that adding up the revenue reported by all your marketing platforms somehow exceeds your actual total revenue, you’re not alone. The reality is that platforms have inherent incentives to make themselves look good.

The big ad platforms have faced lawsuits centered around inflated ad viewership and complaints about overreporting conversion value. These platforms want you to keep spending with them, so their reporting naturally tends to emphasize their contribution—sometimes at the expense of accuracy.

An independent MMM platform like Prescient serves as an unbiased referee. It looks at your actual business outcomes and determines which channels and campaigns truly contributed to them, without the conflict of interest that platform-specific reporting inherently carries.

This unbiased view is invaluable for making rational budget allocation decisions. Without it, you’re left trying to reconcile conflicting claims from platforms that all insist they deserve more of your budget. Your MMM platform cuts through this noise to show you what’s really happening, allowing you to invest with confidence rather than being swayed by whichever platform has the most persuasive dashboard.

In an environment where every marketing dollar needs to be justified, having this objective perspective isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity for responsible budget management.

Reason #5: The ROI of using an MMM far exceeds its cost

When evaluating which tools to keep and which to cut, ROI should be your north star. And few marketing technologies can match the return provided by a well-implemented MMM platform.

Prescient’s platform is designed for speed and efficiency, with onboarding that takes just 15 minutes and delivers insights within 36 hours. The models update daily, meaning you’re always working with the most current information—a significant advantage over traditional MMMs that might take a month or more to refresh.

This rapid time-to-value means you can start optimizing your marketing spend almost immediately. Rather than waiting weeks or months to see the impact of your decisions, you can make improvements continually, compounding your returns over time.

The math here is compelling: if your marketing budget is $1 million and your MMM platform helps you improve efficiency by just 10%, that’s $100,000 in either saved costs or additional revenue.

Beyond the direct ROI, consider the opportunity cost of not having these insights. Without an MMM platform:

How much might you overspend on saturated campaigns?
How much revenue might you miss by underinvesting in high-potential channels?
How much time might your team waste debating which initiatives are working without concrete data?
How much are cuts harming sales in all your channels/omnichannel sales?

These hidden costs add up quickly, making your MMM platform one of the most value-generating tools in your marketing technology stack.

Reason #6: In a privacy-first world, it’s your most reliable measurement solution

The digital marketing landscape has fundamentally changed. With iOS privacy changes, cookie deprecation, and increasing use of ad blockers (over a third of Americans used them in 2022, according to statistics cited in Prescient’s documentation), traditional tracking methods are becoming less reliable by the day.

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) and other pixel-based measurement solutions are fighting a losing battle against these privacy changes. Their effectiveness diminishes with each new privacy update, making them increasingly unreliable for serious marketing decisions.

Marketing mix modeling, by contrast, doesn’t rely on pixels or cookies. It uses statistical modeling and your actual sales data to determine what’s working. This makes MMM platforms like Prescient “future-proof” against privacy changes—they’ll continue to provide accurate insights regardless of what happens with user tracking technology.

Cutting your MMM platform doesn’t just remove a tool; it eliminates your most reliable source of marketing measurement in an era where reliable measurement is getting harder to come by. When other attribution methods are providing increasingly incomplete data, your MMM platform becomes not just valuable but essential.

Wrapping it up…

When budgets tighten, the instinct to cut costs is natural. But cutting your MMM platform to save money is indeed like stopping a clock to save time—it might seem logical in the moment, but it ultimately works against your goals because marketing activity, just like time, can’t stop.

Your MMM platform isn’t just another marketing tool; it’s the intelligence layer that ensures all your other marketing investments deliver maximum value. Without it, you risk making critical budget decisions based on incomplete or biased information, potentially wasting far more than you save by cutting the platform itself.

For marketers already using Prescient, now is the time to leverage it even more intensively, using its insights to identify efficiencies and maximize the impact of every dollar spent. For those considering cuts, take the time to calculate the true cost of losing the visibility your MMM platform provides.

In challenging times, you need more clarity, not less. Your MMM platform delivers that clarity, making it not just worth keeping, but essential to navigating uncertain economic waters successfully.