Skills To Build Media Mix Models

Recently I was contacted by a recruiter who was scouring the web for people specializing in media mix modeling (MMM). “You, guys, are hard to find” – he told me. Yes, we are. And the questions we try to answer are hard too:

“How is my marketing doing? What is the ROI on marketing? What is the unique contribution to my sales of each one of the many marketing vehicles I use? How is my social media strategy impacted by my PPC strategy, if at all?”. These are the questions. To answer them, you need four types of skills that you can rarely have in one person but you MUST have in a well-balanced MMM team:

-         Data extraction, the old ETL process: extract, transform, load. You need an expert at writing super-efficient SQL queries. You need somebody who can find and extract the relevant pieces of data from a thousand of different files. And I am not exaggerating here. I had to merge pieces of data that I extracted from thousands of excel and csv files.

-         Once the data is extracted and loaded in one data set, you need the master modeler. Usually somebody with PhD level knowledge and skills in analyzing time series.

-         Then you need the software engineer, or at least a very experienced software developer. In the modeling process there are a lot of tasks that you want automated beyond just writing functions. Often you want to create a custom-made client-facing interface, a simulator that allows the clients to run simulations based on the model. It is more actionable and more valuable than a PowerPoint presentation.

-         Last, but not least, you need somebody with deep understanding of marketing who can build the conceptual model of how money is made in a company. This requires not only deep understanding of business and marketing but also exceptional communications skills. This person has to talk with stakeholders throughout the company and figure out all the idiosyncrasies of the ways in which customers are acquired and money is made.

Building a team with all these skills is already difficult. And if you find one person that has all four skills, just hire them.

Why do you need MMM? click here

What is MMM? click here