MMM masterclass: Bupa’s open book on business data feeding Atomic 212° a benchmark for agency-client transparency and trust

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Marketing mix modelling (MMM) only works if brands grant their agencies access to critical business data – and many don’t in a perplexing and decades-long challenge. But equally, agencies can be guilty of slowing media pricing and audience data into their client MMM models, rounding out the two-way data conundrum. It’s ironic given all the talk of partnerships and outcome-based incentives, per Mutinex APAC CEO, Mat Baxter.

Bupa and Atomic 212°, says Baxter, are standout examples of genuine client-agency transparency – and it’s powering not just “marginal gain theory” in which lots of small, incremental components are optimised to drive growth, but hard, 28 per cent ROI gains in specific incidences. Bupa plugged into the platform in 2022 and performance lead Angas Hill says without a free flow of business data to Atomic 212° – sales, revenue, pricing and competitiveness data included - “there's not much point in standing up an MMM model.”

Bupa does and now the CFO sees the MMM outputs as “the most trusted source we have in terms of attribution and forecasting”.

Bupa uses those monthly ROI insights to shape the quarterly media plan – with Atomic 212° already plugged-in across what’s working and what’s not at a business level. “It’s just speeding up that whole process,” says Hill. “We are seeing long-term growth in our effectiveness for what is essentially flat media budgets.” Plus, he says, on-off testing via MMM, e.g. testing one region and channel against another, “is where we are seeing much more drastic changes.”

Atomic 212°’s Tom Sheppard underlines broader benefits from using MMM outputs to inform trading strategy: “If we understand what the ROI is, we can negotiate. If [as a result] we can decrease that cost base of certain channels, all of a sudden we can automatically improve the return that the client is getting,” per Sheppard.

“The MMM is fantastic at telling us what's worked in the past and to give us the next best decision,” he adds. Now he says Atomic 212° and Bupa are adding new inputs and channels “to get even better signals – so as a result, everyone wins.”

Next step is making automatic media transaction feeds via API the norm, per Baxter. “That is the future of where we are going.”

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