The 2025 Guide to Mixed Media Models (MMM) and Audio

Apr 4, 2025

Are you working with mixed media models (MMM) to assess and plan your media mix (or considering doing so)? Do you have questions about how digital audio—not legacy AM/FM radio, but streaming audio and podcasts—fits into your MMM? Here’s what you need to know.

Download

What Is MMM?

Though MMM is a buzzword these days, it’s not new. Media mix modeling is a statistical analysis technique that harkens back to the days before digital advertising. And in the face of increasing data privacy policies and concerns, it’s made a resurgence. These models take aggregated data to measure a variety of marketing tactics to then forecast the estimated impact of media channels and campaigns.

MMM provides a holistic view of the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns on consumer behavior. Output is a broad channel-level performance report, which can be used to assign annual budgets at channel level. MMM analyses measure at least one quarter and often a full year of media.

Digital Audio and MMM

Models aren’t built overnight, and many are still reflecting old data. Digital audio companies like SiriusXM Media haven’t traditionally been involved throughout the MMM process. As a result, many MMMs are currently reflecting legacy radio data and bucketing all audio together, without the nuance of media type (e. g., streaming audio or podcasts) or provider (e. g., us, Spotify, iHeart, etc.).

The good news: That’s changing. We’re currently working with MMMs to ensure that you get a more accurate picture of how digital audio can impact your campaigns. In the meantime, we’re here to answer any questions and walk you through how our networks and platforms can drive measurable results for your brand.

Keep Privacy-Forward Targeting in Mind

We’re ahead of the curve when it comes to privacy-forward targeting solutions. The data privacy concerns driving many marketers to MMMs have not impacted our ability to connect brands with the right audience, at the right time, with the right message. From opted-in first-party data to innovative contextual techniques, we’re creating better advertising experiences for brands and audiences—and offering full-funnel measurement solutions.

What to know About MMMs and Digital Audio

If you’re currently using MMM and assess digital audio for your campaigns, here are some things to keep in mind.

MMM Benefits

Side-by-side media comparison
Privacy safe

MMM Challenges

Models updated 1-2 times a year
Currently bucketing all audio together
Lacking audience and demographic data
Typically value efficiency over effectiveness
Missing or lack of precise geo data in current data streams

Coming Soon to MMM

Simplified digital audio data delivered
High-quality and more granular data quality
Industry leadership in collaboration with IAB and The Trade Desk

The 3 Flavors of MMM

There are three different industry terms using the same acronym—which can get a bit confusing. Let’s go over what they are and what they mean.

Most common: Media mix modeling
Emerging: Agile medial modeling
Legacy: Market mix modeling

Bad, better, best

Here’s our take of the three types of MMM.

Bad: Media mix modeling: Short-term ROI, capturing the effectiveness of media (impression and marketing spend data correlation to sales). This is digital audio’s current position.

Better: Agile MMM: Requires more granular inputs to optimize media beyond ROI. This is digital audio’s next step.

Best: Market mix modeling: Broader and longer-term scientific analysis that includes many variables (e. g., brand health, economic conditions, weather, logistics-distribution, etc.). This is the future position for digital audio.

Keep in Mind

If your audio buys serve dual roles (e. g., brand building and short-term ROI), current models for audio typically do not include and neglect long-term brand health impact vs. models built for legacy platforms.

Best Practices

Consider two separate media plan designs. One based on R FP details (which for digital audio tends to lean more toward brand building), and a second media plan built to optimize towards MMM performance.