What is offline media spend in MMM?

Digital channels report themselves. TV, radio, out-of-home, print, cinema, sponsorships and influencer collaborations do not: the spend lives in media plans, agency invoices and broadcaster spot reports, in a different shape for each. Offline media spend is that money, and for a marketing mix model it is often the most important money, because it is the part attribution cannot see at all and the part where the budget questions are largest.

The rule at Odins is that offline channels get a pipeline, never a monthly upload. Media plans and spot reports come in from the customer or its media agency, through a standing feed, and are broken down to the individual spot or placement: this spot on this broadcaster at this time at this cost. From there each spot lands in the same hierarchy as the digital campaigns, at the same daily grain and in the same currency. With a well-organized agency the history is in place within a day.

By default, costs that vary with the media go in and fixed agency fees and mark-ups stay out, a choice made with you before the first model, so the model measures the effect of the media rather than the invoicing.

A TV campaign entered as one monthly total tells the model nothing about which weeks the spots ran. Spot-level data lets the model see the flight pattern, estimate carryover from it, and credit TV's pull-through on search and social in the following weeks to TV. It is also what makes a question like "what did the Saturday prime-time spots do compared with daytime" answerable later, from the data already there.

Collecting and structuring offline spend is part of the managed service, and some customers use Odins for that alone, as the one place where their TV and radio spend sits next to their digital spend in a structure their warehouse can take.

• Channel hierarchy: The one structure every source lands in: market, product, segment, then channel down to the spot. Digital and offline side by side.
• Structured marketing data: Every source, one dataset, your hierarchy, your warehouse. The foundation the model sits on, and a product on its own.
• Adstock: The carryover effect: the part of this week's advertising that lands in the weeks that follow.
• Long-term brand effect: The slow lift in baseline demand from sustained brand investment, beyond the weeks adstock covers.

Go one level deeper: TV, radio and offline media connectors. Measuring TV, connected TV and YouTube with MMM. Or go back to all terms in the glossary.