How Wrong Is Your Marketing Mix Model (MMM)?

Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) often produce misleading results because the historical spend data they learn from is fundamentally flawed. Key issues like multi-collinearity, where channel spends move in unison, and selection bias, where spending simply follows consumer demand, make it difficult to isolate the true impact of each channel. These models also struggle to accurately identify crucial parameters like adstock, the lingering effect of an ad, and saturation, the point of diminishing returns. This study uses a simulation with a known "ground truth" to test if a budget phasing algorithm, which strategically varies *when* money is spent, can introduce the necessary variation to build more trustworthy models.