I wrote in our 2026 Playbook that this would be the year MMM funded the brand marketing comeback, after a decade of industry underinvestment. We’re nearly halfway through, and the case keeps building.
Quick recap on how we got here.
For most of the 2010s, click attribution made it look like search and social were doing the heavy lifting. Budgets followed the dashboards. The work that didn’t fit into a UTM (TV, OOH, podcasts, partnerships, sponsorships) got squeezed. Brand teams defended themselves with theory. Performance teams pointed at graphs.
Then that changed.
Cookie deprecation, iOS changes, walled gardens, AI-driven media buys. Last-click started measuring less and less of what was actually happening. Efficiency was improving, but growth wasn’t.
Then MMM, finally.
Marketing Mix Modelling isn’t new. Procter & Gamble were doing versions of it in the 1980s. But what’s new is access. Gartner launched its first MMM Magic Quadrant in 2024 and expanded it in 2025. Forrester now lists MMM among the top five technologies marketers plan to deploy. 47% of US brand and agency marketers say they’ll invest in it in the next twelve months. Google open-sourced Meridian, then dropped a no-code Scenario Planner on top of it in February 2026. The barrier to entry has changed drastically.
And here’s where it gets interesting.
Model your full media mix properly (adstocks, diminishing returns curves, an organic baseline) and the picture changes. Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome database, sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of spend across more than a thousand brands, keeps finding the same thing. Upper-funnel tactics are around 25% less effective in the short term than lower-funnel ones, and 60% more effective over the long term. Brand messaging outperforms performance messaging 80% of the time. Brands that shift from performance-only to a mixed brand + performance approach see a 90% median uplift in ROI.
The market is starting to respond. Two-thirds of UK media buyers now name programmatic DOOH as their top growth priority for the year ahead, and 40% of that spend is coming from new, incremental budget rather than being pinched from somewhere else. CTV is being treated as a full-funnel channel. Podcast and partnership budgets are climbing. The channels that were impossible to defend in a click-attribution world have the strongest models behind them.
However…
WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2026 found that marketers expecting smaller budgets this year are more likely to add to performance (42%) than brand (29%). The doom loop hasn’t gone away. The instinct, when budgets tighten, is still to retreat into what feels measurable. That instinct is what MMM exists to stop. Binet and Field’s analysis of 996 IPA campaigns has been making the point for years: roughly 60/40 brand-to-activation tends to optimise long-term profit. The reason it gets ignored isn’t disagreement but because that “long-term profit” doesn’t show up in next month’s report.
MMM fixes that. A good model puts a number on the long-term effect, sits it next to last week’s ROAS, and forces the trade-off out into the open.
So for 2026, if you’ve got MMM running, use it to do what it was built to do. Shift money. Don’t validate the existing plan. Find the upper-funnel investment your last-click reporting has been hiding, and fund it.
If you don’t have MMM running yet, this is the year to start. The tooling is more accessible, the methodologies are better understood, and the case for moving budget back up the funnel has never been more defensible.
