Prophet, Australia’s most advanced decision intelligence platform that helps businesses simulate decisions before making them in the real world has unveiled its 101 guide to Market Mix Modelling (MMM), designed to help marketers to move from reporting the past, to rehearsing the future.
MMM 101: From Measurement to Rehearsed Reality is a practical guide to MMM, created to help marketers uncover blind spots within their marketing measurement tools, so they can more clearly demonstrate the commercial impact of their marketing activity to the C-suite.
The guide includes a marketing measurement blind spot checklist for marketers to cross-check against their own operations, along with information about what successful MMM looks like, what it measures and how to build an internal business case for MMM.
The guide comes as the economic climate tightens and pressure from finance teams on the true business impact of marketing, not just channel metrics, rises. Two thirds of marketers say proving the financial impact of their marketing activity is their biggest challenge^.
Prophet Head of Marketing Science, Rachel Scott, said: “Australian marketers spend billions of dollars each year trying to drive growth, yet industry estimates suggest more than $6.1 billion of digital advertising spend in Australia is wasted annually* on ineffective media.
“But the bigger issue is often not wasted spend, it’s ‘invisible’ impact Demand tends to build gradually across multiple channels before a customer ultimately converts.”
For example, an automotive analysis conducted by Prophet, which modelled more than 300,000 test drives, found that more than a third were directly influenced by marketing activity, and rarely by a single interaction.”
Scott said attribution dashboards often struggle to capture this broader system effect.
“Marketing can show platform performance, but finance is looking for commercial impact. Brand investment often sits awkwardly in the middle of that conversation. CFOs are naturally cautious about spend that cannot be easily quantified, and brand rarely appears clearly inside attribution dashboards,” she said.
“The channels that capture demand tend to get the credit, while the activity that created the demand in the first place becomes harder to see. That gap is where marketing credibility quietly erodes, not because marketing is not working, but because the measurement framework cannot demonstrate how it works.”
The MMM101 Guide is designed to help organisations analyse their full marketing ecosystem and identify the gaps, while also assisting them to navigate the shift by examining which channels are working, which ones aren’t, and where budget is drifting because reporting is incomplete.
In one recent analysis of a consumer retail campaign, Prophet’s modelling revealed that a broader video strategy spread across multiple digital environments was up to three times more efficient than television alone. Without modelling, that difference in media performance would have remained invisible until after the campaign ended.
Prophet operates as a simulation engine by building a digital clone of an organisation that incorporates internal business data alongside external macroeconomic factors. This allows marketers to test scenarios and simulate decisions before any budget is committed.
“The real value of MMM isn’t just analysing what already happened, but what happens next,” Scott said.
Scott said the guide aims to demystify MMM for marketers.
“This guide is not about making MMM sound perfect. It’s about providing a framework that ensures marketing decisions are measurable, explainable and defensible. Put simply, MMM is maths. It’s a statistical model that isolates variables, quantifies their contribution and separates signal from noise. Instead of tracking individual user journeys across platforms, it analyses the entire marketing ecosystem and measures how changes in investment influence business outcomes over time,” she said. “Crucially, it also accounts for the external forces shaping demand.”
In one financial services analysis conducted by Prophet, modelling revealed that marketing investment not only drove customer acquisition but also prevented the loss of up to 33,000 existing customers who would likely have churned without continued brand and customer experience investment.
Since its 2024 launch, Prophet has rapidly expanded its client base across industries including retail, insurance, automotive, media, on-demand delivery, wagering and cybersecurity.
It was awarded the AFR BOSS Most Innovative Company in the Media and Marketing category in 2025.
The MMM101 Guide: From Measurement to Rehearsed Reality can be accessed here.
Sources:
^The CMO Survey, Leading Marketing in a Complex World, 2025.
*Next&Co Digital Media Wastage Report 2024
