“Hey…you got chocolate in my peanut butter!”

This line from a 1980’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups campaign is a classic in advertising…and aptly describes what is happening in marketing measurement today. (For a blast from the past click here to view this oldie!)

Two proven techniques that work great separately – attribution and marketing mix modeling – work even better when merged into a unified measurement approach.

I suspected the convergence of different marketing analytics approaches was inevitable so earlier this year, my colleague Tina Moffett and I began sharing our ideas on where marketing measurement was headed.   We agreed each approach provides only a partial answer to the marketing ROI puzzle and they shared enough methodological similarity that merging them was plausible.

We’ve just completed research that shows that our intuition is correct and in our new report "Embrace Unified Marketing Impact Analytics to Deliver Value Across Interactions" we dubbed this converged approach as Unified Marketing Impact Analytics (UMIA), defining it as:

A blend of statistical techniques that assigns business value to each element of the marketing mix at both a strategic and tactical level. 

UMIA uses multiple marketing analytics approaches to get a comprehensive customer view of marketing performance.  It has elements of marketing mix modeling to help CMOs get laser sharp focus on budget based allocations, while other elements borrowed from attribution give marketing professional the tactical guidance needed to optimize creative and media placement decisions. For CI pros, it’s a gateway for customer journey analytics, providing deep insights to the value of marketing exposures across different segments and paths.

This report will serve as the vision doc for  Forrester’s newly created playbook, The Marketing Measurement and Insights Playbook.  This playbook helps marketers identify the best approaches to measure, analyze, and optimize all marketing efforts, with a specific focus on metrics of success.  While published in the Customer Insights role, it helps B2C and CI pros  identify how they can collaborate on deeper, more unified marketing performance insights, while developing more analysis on customer behaviors and movements along the purchase path.

Tina and I are excited to co-author this new playbook going forward.  We’re interested in hearing from you too!  Send us an email about any topic areas you want us to research for the new Marketing Measurement and Insights Playbook.