Optimizing MMM in-Housing in APAC: Rebuilding foundations and navigating scenarios
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When strategic and structural roadblocks hinder in-house MMM success, revitalize your marketing measurement capabilities. Our second installment emphasizes critical factors for a comprehensive approach, offering strategies to adeptly navigate scenarios, to streamline and steer performance at scale.
When strategic and structural roadblocks hinder in-house Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) success, revitalize your marketing measurement capabilities. In this APAC-focused installment, we emphasize critical factors for a comprehensive approach, offering strategies to adeptly navigate scenarios, to streamline and steer performance at scale.
Following our exploration of decoding the challenges of MMM in-housing, we delve into the foundational steps required to rebuild capabilities and align ecosystems, emphasizing the significance of taxonomy, skill development, and internal alignment for a comprehensive approach to Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) insourcing. This second installment also unveils strategies to empower your teams to navigate scenarios for optimal performance at scale.
1. Rebuilding the foundations of MMM in-housing
Are you collecting the right data, in the right place, at the right time? In APAC markets, this challenge is amplified by digital fragmentation and diverse consumer behaviors. There are three fundamental steps in this process:
- Build standards – To ensure effective MMM in-housing, (re)building standards becomes paramount. In APAC, this involves considering diverse market dynamics and consumer behaviors across countries like China, Japan, and India. Establishing a common language and reference tool creates a "language harmony" among stakeholders. In China, where walled gardens dominate (e.g., Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance), building a standardized taxonomy is more complex yet more critical than ever, particularly as livestreaming reshapes marketing paradigms. Unlike Western markets, where livestreaming remains nascent, China’s livestreaming commerce ecosystem has matured into a $3 billion powerhouse, blending entertainment, social interaction, and real-time commerce into a seamless conversion engine [1] [2]. For global brands, China’s livestreaming dominance necessitates taxonomies that reflect local media formats and e-commerce structures, ensuring consistency across regional teams and partners. Establishing a common language and reference tool creates a "language harmony" among stakeholders. Detailed and precise taxonomy, aligned with organizational structures, enhances data readability and accelerates insights, delivering concrete results to business lines three to six months after the launch of an in-housing program.
- Orchestrate skills development – MMM in-housing is not just about data; it involves people. Orchestrate the development of both technical and human skills. Across the APAC region, the talent landscape is evolving at different speeds. Mature analytics hubs like Singapore offer a deep pool of skilled professionals, while emerging markets such as Vietnam are rapidly building their data capabilities. In China, the competition for data-literate marketers is fierce due to the country's rapid MarTech evolution. According to the Global AI Index, China leads APAC in AI and data investment, tech skills, innovation and implementation [3]. Supporting this trajectory, China’s AI industry is projected to reach a market size of CN¥1.73 trillion ($237 billion) by 2035 - representing over 30% of the global market [4]. Recruiting individuals with expertise in data science AND marketing is the initial step. To retain them, offer evolving challenges through a data and human resources roadmap, fostering career development. This strategic approach ensures the longevity and commitment of the team building your technology assets.
- Align ecosystem for greater agility – Internally aligning the MMM project with business needs is crucial for scalability. Starting from the business question, making strategic choices, and reworking personas ensure business criticality. A test-and-learn approach becomes a prerequisite to assess your ability to scale up: Conducting a pilot in a specific country or product category allows you to demonstrate added value and ROI.
External alignment is equally vital, involving stakeholders from media agencies to tech players. A hybrid approach, involving a data and marketing mix partner, bridges expertise gaps and facilitates a seamless transformation. A leading toy brand partnered with Ekimetrics to leverage MMM, aiming to assess media efficiency and refine marketing investments across four strategic APAC markets: China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The initiative unlocked actionable insights tailored to each market’s unique consumer landscape, driving over $15 million spend optimization in media planning. Building on this success, the brand established a recurring global program with periodic updates, ensuring agility in adapting to APAC’s dynamic consumer preferences and evolving media ecosystems.
2. Streamlining and steering performance: the power of scenarios
How can APAC marketing leaders empower their teams to make faster, better decisions in complex environments?
- Adopt scenario-building for strategic decisions – The adoption phase in MMM in-housing requires thoughtful planning. Empower marketing, finance, and sales teams by helping them understand the benefits. Scenario-building emerges as an essential tool in this process. Teams independently configuring their assumptions leads to increased speed and robust decision-making. This in-housing of scenario-building capacity supports team convictions and provides new perspectives.
- Anticipate scenarios for proactive response – In-house MMM empowers business units to anticipate various scenarios and associated risks. Configuring scenarios for different assumptions allows proactive preparation for the best or worst outcomes. With the ability to react swiftly to unfolding scenarios, business units demonstrate increased agility. By leveraging insights from data, marketing teams can establish a range of scenariossuch as baseline, optimistic, and pessimistic projections. For instance, Ekimetrics partnered with a motor insurance company in Japan to utilize MMM to forecast performance against new business targets under varying market conditions, including shifts in car sales and competitor actions. This scenario building capability enables companies to adapt their marketing strategies quicklyreallocating budgets based on channel effectivenessand forecast the impact on overall sales performance with data-driven approaches.
In conclusion, the success of fully or partially in-housing an MMM project lies in its ability to generate short-term gains and sustain a brand over the long term. Key fundamentals include implementing robust data foundations, developing advanced modeling capabilities, and ensuring effective change management. The hybrid format emerges as the most suitable, de-risking scaling efforts and accelerating deployment, ultimately multiplying business impact. A strategic, step-by-step approach is recommended, emphasizing small initiatives and involving the complete marketing ecosystem for optimal results.
Sources:
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/video-marketing-china-expert-strategies-2025-wjh1e/
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-chinese-livestreaming-commerce-global-markets-2025-zsuve/
