EMPOWERING MARKETERS,
ONE MOVE AT A TIME

As a recent CMO, my expectations were not grounded in reality. I wanted to build a marketing system that delivered clarity and flawless optimization. I hired agencies to do the heavy lifting, but wanted an all knowing piece of tech to layer over the top of everything to make sure my budgets were optimized and aligned. My team consisted of 5 people and each of them had specific roles. I had a copy writer, social media manager, media planner/buyer and a designer. We had a creative agency and an attribution measurement agency. Yes, this was expensive, but my goal was to build the ultimate marketing machine. While everything needed a considerable amount of attention, there was one answer that kept alluding me. Cross platform budget optimization. What do I mean by this? How do I have 100% certainty that my budgets across all channels were exactly what was needed? Sure, Facebook, Google, TikTok and even Snap have incredible optimization tools for their platform, but they would never tell me to spend less on theirs and shift budget to another. Never! I wanted to know how all of my channels laddered up to sales.

Would growing my Instagram followers increase sales, or just give me very difficult task with no quantifiable return?

I spent years on marketing stages pitching the benefits of attribution modeling as the holy grail. Now let me tell you why it's not:

Attribution Modeling is truly over

Attribution was invented in 1958 as a way to measure outside forces to a result in social psychology. Like everything, clever marketers got a hold of it and built a very compelling model for a totally measured marketing world. It came full of promise, not only from the "transparent" platforms, but from holistic advertisers. What started out as "Last Click" measurement evolved into multiple rules based and black box strategies. From blended clicks, game theory and intelligent Markov Chain attribution models, attribution was the pinnacle of making every day marketers feel dumb. If it didn't work, it was probably their fault, certainly not the tech.

To make things worse, with privacy laws in the USA, GDPR in Europe, Apple's cookie restriction and Facebook's dominance--Attribution Marketing died before it ever reached it's goal towards total measurement. Today, most attribution businesses have limited scope and only work within particular platforms (e.g. Google and most programmatic buying networks). Their insights are fragmented and probabilistic over deterministic.

Let's clear something up; It's just another model and it's not measuring every single thing. With modeling and an over reliance on last click (which is still the most common measurement) your measurement will completely fail to capture the entire sales journey.

Attribution Marketing came full of promises with its eye on defeating the old way of measuring incrementality. Sellers of attribution were determined to destroy MMM or marketing mix modeling.

The Limitations of MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling)

MMM is still valid to some extent and making a comeback for certain use cases due to attribution marketing falling apart. Yes, MMM has value but it struggles to keep pace with today's rapidly changing ecosystem. Warning, if you want to run MMM, you will need a full time data scientist, or an expensive software deployment and definitely someone who knows how to run it. It's also hard. It may take a year to build your model and then a few more years for it to work! Most of your insights will be annual so it will likely be too late to act on trends and new channels. It's also very data heavy and may require historical data that you wont have.

Looking at both of these approaches and their value, I wanted to find something that was a middle ground. Steeped in scientific viability, useful for the marketing system I was trying to build and affordable.

We believe in...

Simplicity Without Compromise

Knowing what to do next is always the question. And finding a simple way to do so is tricky. With Integrated Impact Modeling, we can deliver clarity and actions without the complexity. Our business model is not designed to make you feel dumb, but to empower you for a changing future.

Whats next? Looking ahead to AI agentic marketing. Yes, it is a scary concept, but we believe...

Tools Should Work for You, Not Replace You

In the future, our ai agent will be part of your team, much like chat-gpt deep seek or any generative ai tool you use. Be aware, this tool does not replace your digital marketing agency, it just makes them better. The way AI should be used is to help us go faster, deeper and with more confidence. We plan to use ai to uncover patterns in the complicated set of data. It's job is to help you quickly understand that the money your SEO vendor spent on link building did actually produce some meaningful result. It doesn't mean they should get all of your budget, it just means that you can have a real growth conversation with real data.

The Power of Integrated Marketing

When you grow all of your marketing efforts together, you grow stronger. Social Media fuels Google Search, PR pushes Website direct traffic, Out of home increases brand name search and your customer service really creates testimonials that push more sales than any of your tactics. Marketing is better when unified. That's why we've built ViVV Labs - to help marketers make smarter, more integrated decisions that drive real business results.