Tapan Khopkar: A ‘MasterClass’ in Marketing Mix

Tapan is the Executive Director of Marketing Sciences at OMD. This episode is a very thorough compendium of marketing science principles and practices, as applied to decisions about paid media. Topics include:

• Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) vs Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) vs experiments, including how to use each and for what purpose
• KPIs: Incremental sales vs top-of-funnel metrics like awareness and consideration
• How to design incremental changes in the direction that a model is pointing
• Testing a new marketing mix in various geo markets
• Judicious use of model hyperparameters, such as AdStocks
• The best cadence for measurement
• Third-party cookies (Implications of the shift towards user choice)
• Recent tools: Google Meridian (a Bayesian approach) vs Meta Robyn (a frequentist approach)

These ideas are brought to life with an example from a financial services brand, planning a big launch, with a need to answer questions like: How should the paid media budget be allocated? Should the focus be branding first and performance later? How should ad spend be flighted (Always-On vs Burst and Trickle)? In effect, this show is a Master Class regarding marketing science, as described by one of the world’s top authorities on the topic, who’s currently an Executive Director at OMD, which is the world’s largest media agency network.