Data Strategies That Will Make MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution) Work for Your Organization

Multi-Touch Attribution is hard work but essential in the digital age.

by Joel Rubinson
President at Rubinson Partners Inc

The former chairman of the largest media agency in the world once said at a conference I attended, “Marketing has to look a lot more like digital… it can’t go the other way!” Such a simple and brilliant insight. But what does a digital world mean for those involved in modeling advertising effectiveness? I believe it means that MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution) is an integral part of the marketing future.

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), the big regression models of aggregated marketing data versus sales, is still in broad use for media planning. Yes, these models have value, but they do not answer all of the progressive marketer’s questions. MMM is backward-looking (using over three years of historical data, usually). MMM is not very granular; it uses media channels and promotion types as causal variables but doesn’t get to the level of this publisher as opposed to that one, six-second video vs. 15 second, etc. Typically, the consumer is literally not in the equation and so MMM offers no insight into targeting strategies.