Measurement is easy. Change is hard.
When marketers talk about embedding MMM, the conversation usually heads straight for structure: who owns it, where it sits, how often it runs. But the harder and more important question is: how do you get people to actually use it? That’s why I wanted to talk to Lucile Ferraton. She’s leading optimisation at One NZ, and she’s in the thick of making MMM useful inside a big business. And she didn’t hold back.
“Embedding MMM in your organisation is really a cultural shift,” Lucile said. “It’s not about pushing a model out and saying ‘here you go’. It’s about helping people see how it can enable their day-to-day decisions.”
That’s a mindset shift. And it doesn’t happen just because there’s a great dashboard floating around. It happens when people understand the thinking behind the model and see how it applies to decisions that matter to them.
Trust is built, not assumed
One of Lucile’s first learnings was that the best way to kill adoption is to over-assume understanding. Teams need time and support to build trust in the model.
“We realised early on that if people didn’t understand the assumptions behind the model, they wouldn’t trust the recommendations,” she said. “So a big part of our role became education, explaining the why behind the numbers.”
That also meant navigating different perspectives across teams. Media teams, finance, performance marketers, they all see value through a different lens. Lucile said the key was getting everyone to speak the same language.
“There’s a lot of effort in the initial phases,” she said. “You’re spending time with stakeholders who all have slightly different views of performance. The challenge is bringing everyone together around a common language.”
Prove it in moments that matter
A turning point came when Lucile and her team used MMM to help back decisions during budget negotiations. When teams saw the model helping them hold — or grow — spend, everything changed.
“We used the model to support tough conversations,” she said. “That made the insights real. People saw how MMM could help them defend or grow their budgets, and that shifted perceptions.”
This wasn’t about flashy ROI figures, it was about making the model useful in the conversations that count.
Use it to plan, not just report
MMM can do more than tell you what worked. At One NZ, Lucile used it as a forward-looking tool, a way to plan campaigns, set expectations, and test ideas.
“We used each new campaign or channel shift as a moment to run a mini-experiment,” she said. “And we made sure the insights were played back to the teams that owned the decision. That loop is critical.”
I’ve said this before: forecasting tools, like Mutinex’s Scenario Builder, are essential. They give teams a range of likely outcomes based on actual incrementality, which makes test-and-learn not just possible, but expected.
Make it monthly, or risk losing momentum
Lucile also shared something we see time and time again: MMM needs rhythm. When analysis is ad hoc, it’s easily ignored. But when it’s baked into the monthly cycle, it becomes habit.
“If it’s not regular, it fades into the background,” she said. “Monthly cycles gave us a drumbeat. It helped us create rituals around data; reporting, review, action. That’s what really made the program feel embedded.”
And Lucile was smart about where she started. She didn’t try to roll it out to the whole business at once.
“We didn’t try to win over everyone at once,” she said. “We found teams that were already curious, already testing, and built success stories with them. Those stories travelled further than any formal rollout.”
Final thought
There’s a reason we keep coming back to this: MMM is only as powerful as the decisions it informs. And making that happen inside a real business takes more than good data science. It takes trust, communication, consistency, and a little bit of patience.
As I said in the episode, “You can have the best measurement in the world, but if no one’s going to act on it, then it’s not going to deliver any value.
Confidence. Frameworks. Cadence. That’s what gets MMM out of the model and into the business.
Watch the MMMorning! episode here.
[Will Marks is Head of Marketing Science at Mutinex]