Just as the legendary sphinx would ask new riddles each time, media mix modeling presented new challenges in every corner.

Media Mix Modeling is actually an old classic approach for modeling the impact of different ad campaigns on your product purchases. The concept in a nutshell, is to consider the spend in each ad campaign, on a daily basis for a period of say, six months backwards. Then, fit a regression model to explain the overall number of purchases, using the variance in spend of different campaigns.

Sounds easy, right? Sure, but that just doesn’t cut it. One also needs to consider many more effects, such as: ad stocking, diminishing returns, holidays, trend, and seasonality. And that still doesn’t work…

In this talk I present the journey we went through searching for the right modeling approach, the right evaluation approach, some of the lessons we learned, and some of the neatest tricks we used to combine theory and practice.