The Future of MMM

A Three Part Series on the Future of MMM

Commercial MMM has traditionally been sold as a vertically integrated product: a vendor owns the software, hosts it, chooses the model, integrates the data, and helps the advertiser use the results. That structure is beginning to break apart. Open-source frameworks now provide much of the estimation, transformation, diagnostics, and optimization required for a modern MMM, making proprietary engines harder to defend as the center of a commercial offering.

But open source alone does not solve the market’s measurement problem. MMM vendors make causal claims and recommend shifting large advertising budgets, yet buyers lack credible standards for comparing accuracy, stability, calibration, and robustness across systems. That uncertainty makes it difficult to select a provider—or even decide whether adopting MMM is worth the cost—and helps explain why many advertisers still rely on last-click attribution.

As the engine becomes shared and evaluation improves, commercial value moves toward implementation. Different verticals often use different structural forms, measure outcomes differently, and require different controls, data, experiments, and decision workflows. The market therefore separates into four roles: open-source software, hosting, verticalized modeling and integration, and operation of the production system. The three essays develop the argument in depth.