Are we in the outcomes era? (Shouldn’t it have always been?)
Today, in a blog post, Google announced wide availability of Meridian, a marketing mix model that they built and launched open-source last year in limited availability.
To drive adoption and scale for Meridian, Google also announced a partner program featuring companies like Accenture, Jellyfish, and Kinesso, who are trained and certified on it right now. Google says Meridian is now in general availability after “testing it with hundreds of brands globally and incorporating their feedback.”
Why This Matters:
You will be shocked to learn that marketing is becoming more fragmented by the day, with more and more touchpoints and channels. As a result, and perhaps also shocking (we are joking), is that understanding which campaigns actually drive outcomes and impact KPIs is more challenging than ever.
To address this, Google says more marketers are turning to MMMs, which is why it built Meridian. In its original March 2024 blog post announcing Meridian, Google noted: “We have observed more customers turning to MMMs, especially performance and full-funnel marketers.”
That last point is especially important. (For those unfamiliar, an MMM is essentially a statistical model that connects multiple marketing inputs to sales or KPIs.)
However, traditional MMMs struggle with digital performance media, says Google, failing to fully capture the impact of AI-driven campaigns, paid search, and real-time market shifts. Google claims Meridian modernizes MMMs by using Bayesian causal inference, providing more granular, transparent, and actionable insights.
If you have no idea what that means, that’s OK—neither do I. But, from what I can tell, it’s a fancy way of saying that Meridian doesn’t just look at raw data correlations, like traditional models, but actually tries to figure out cause-and-effect relationships in a smarter way.
Example: instead of general insights like “TV ads boost sales,” it can give more detailed breakdowns, like how much of that effect comes from a specific campaign, in a specific region, over a specific time period. (At least that’s how we’re interpreting it–let us know if that’s not accurate, Google!)
Experts React:
Our Take:
Holy shit, indeed (we think). But how much adoption will Meridian see? Clearly, Google is investing in it, and its partner program seems promising. The fact that it’s open-sourced seems hugely valuable in terms of democratizing MMM-based measurement. The partner program, while impressive, seems a little light, though, no? At least in the U.S. Is that a bad read?
To be fair, we write blog posts, not code, so maybe we’re undervaluing this.
