MMM

Newton Research announced its $9 million Series A raise on Tuesday. The funds will go toward hiring as demand for Newton’s specialized AI agents grows.

The Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is a data-driven advertising metric that’s been around for many years but is now reaching mainstream, or to some at least, revered status.

There are many misconceptions about ad measurement. But the biggest thing most marketers are wrongheaded about is in thinking there’s a single solution for attribution. It simply doesn’t exist, says attribution expert Madan Bharadwaj, founder of measurement startup M^2.

There’s no way around using an assortment of measurement methodologies, says Owen Bickford, the paid performance media director at Alaska Airlines. “I don’t think they can work in a vacuum.”

Ron Jacobson took the classic programmatic startup route. Which is to say, he pivoted randomly from a software job at a bank (well, the New York Fed), landed at an ad tech company and later founded his own ad tech startup before getting acquired by yet another ad tech company.

Marketing measurement is broken, and everyone knows it. Every week, I talk to marketing leaders who are desperate to quantify the revenue that marketing is incrementally delivering to the business. Many of them have some kind of marketing mix model (MMM) in place, yet still rely almost exclusively on last-touch attribution (LTA) to optimize their marketing investments on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

After a reenergizing week at the Cannes Lions festival, here are six observations on how our industry is changing to meet its new challenges.

SiriusXM integrated with Innovid to provide advertisers with the type of impression-level data they get for other digital channels, facilitate more direct comparisons and spur more investment in digital audio.

No one needs reminding that a recession sharpens the knife on every budget line. Yet the 2025 slowdown is arriving just as media trading itself is mutating.

Marketing measurement is messed up – it’s hard to argue otherwise – and most people agree on the reasons why: vanity metrics, imperfect models, unrealistic expectations. But there’s another issue at play, argues Julian Runge, an assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University – and that’s a simple lack of communication.