MMM Is Back: Why Modern Growth Teams Are Pairing Mix Models with Incrementality Testing

For a while, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) was dismissed as too slow, too academic, and too disconnected from the speed of modern growth. But the landscape has shifted. Privacy changes, signal loss from cookies, and pressure to prove ROI have pushed growth leaders back toward models that are causal, channel-agnostic, and privacy-proof.

MMM is back, but this time, it’s different. Modern teams aren’t just dusting off old econometrics. They’re combining mix models with incrementality testing to build measurement systems that are faster, more transparent, and directly tied to business outcomes.

Why MMM Matters Again

Classic attribution tools like last-click or rules-based MTA can’t keep up with fragmented customer journeys. MMM steps in with:

• Holistic view across paid, owned, earned, and offline channels.
• Privacy safety, since MMM doesn’t rely on individual-level tracking.
• Financial grounding, showing ROI in terms of margin and profit lift.

The challenge? Traditional MMMs ran on quarterly cycles, required data science horsepower, and often failed to drive day-to-day decisions.

Enter Incrementality Testing

While MMM gives the big picture, incrementality tests answer the sharp question: Did this campaign actually cause incremental lift?

Marketers run geo-tests, holdouts, and audience splits to measure causal impact at the campaign level. Combined with MMM, incrementality serves as a calibration layer, keeping the model honest and giving leaders confidence that budget shifts will translate into real-world results.

The New Standard: MMM + Incrementality Together

Leading growth teams now see MMM and incrementality not as separate choices, but as complements:

• MMM sets the strategic baseline: long-term, cross-channel effectiveness.
• Incrementality validates and fine-tunes: short-term, campaign-level proof.
• Together, they create a self-correcting system that adapts to signal loss, market shifts, and budget changes.

How Violet Growth Makes This Practical

This is where Violet Growth stands apart. Traditional SaaS MMMs are black boxes, and open-source MMMs demand heavy data science. Violet bridges the gap by offering:

• Unified performance + financial view - not just what drove revenue, but which levers improved margin and profitability.
• Composable modeling - MMM modules and incrementality testing plugged directly into your existing data stack.
• Role-based dashboards - insights tailored for CMOs, CFOs, and GTM leaders alike.
• Rapid deployment - live in 45–90 days, without IT bottlenecks.
• Hands-on partnership - advisory support to design, test, and interpret incrementality experiments that keep MMM grounded in reality.

The result: a measurement framework that’s not just statistical, but actionable. Growth leaders can trust it to guide budget allocation, campaign planning, and board-level strategy.

The Bottom Line

MMM is back because today’s growth leaders need more than vanity dashboards. But MMM alone isn’t enough. The teams winning in 2025 are pairing modern mix models with incrementality testing to build systems that are:

• Transparent
• Causal
• Financially grounded
• Fast enough to keep up with the market

Violet Growth delivers exactly that: giving you a single, multi-dimensional view of performance and profitability, backed by the causal proof your CFO will trust.

Curious how this looks in practice? Explore Violet’s case studies.