Alaska Airlines and consultancy Adswerve have found a projected increase of addressable promoting revenue that might be price as much as $100 million — an 11% projected increase — by utilizing Google’s open-source Meridian marketing mix model (MMM), per details shared with Marketing Dive.
While the rise is a future opportunity, not realized revenue, the predictive evaluation also found a way for Alaska Airlines to secure a 3% increase in return on investment based on budget optimizations. The results exhibit how MMMs like Meridian may also help marketers measure an increasingly complex media landscape.
“We had MMM before, but that is a little more robust than what we had,” said Owen Bickford, paid performance media director at Alaska Airlines. “It’s providing data that we’ve got not likely had access to before.”
When announcing Meridian last 12 months, Google noted that 60% of U.S. advertisers were using MMMs and 58% of those not using these models were considering doing so in the longer term, citing Kantar data. While the statistical evaluation tools have been around for many years, increased media fragmentation has pushed MMMs back in vogue amongst those tackling measurement at agencies and other industry bodies.
Like other MMMs, Meridian helps marketers measure channels including television, radio and out-of-home promoting, giving them a holistic view of how channels affect the complete customer funnel. Meridian also takes in additional information resembling holidays, seasonality, customer reviews and world events.
Google launched Meridian in March 2024 as a method to provide marketers with the muse for comprehensive, privacy-durable measurement capabilities. Since then, the tech giant decided against deprecating third-party cookies or offering an opt-out mechanism, and has faced increased antitrust pressure. Like any product from Google — resembling its Privacy Sandbox proposals — there may be some concern that Meridian might be biased toward Google’s ad offerings.
“I believe it’s yet to be determined if that’s really what it’s going to be. I believe with more data, more iterations, we’ll gain a a lot better insight into the way it’s actually going to look,” Bickford said of any biases inherent to Meridian.
Open-source optimization
Alaska Airlines has worked with Adswerve since 2020, developing different machine learning models around promoting and audience data like predicted lifetime value. Adswerve became a certified Meridian partner in January and utilized a rapid, three-month implementation for its work with the airline.
Meridian helps improve marketing performance by providing granular insights around reach and frequency and a seamless integration of prior business knowledge, especially for giant enterprise marketers like Alaska. But its key profit is providing access to Google Query Volume data.
“The ability to… not only see how persons are googling Alaska flights, but how persons are googling flight travel generally is a huge profit. Then you’ll be able to really discern how much of a difference your ads are doing versus that baseline demand,” said Zach Mitchell, a data scientist at Adswerve.
Adswerve amplifies Meridian’s capabilities via its proprietary dashboard, a tool that provides marketers deeper insights, enables dynamic budget adjustments and allows for experiments around distributions and real-time optimization. As a partner with Google, Adswerve may also help marketers implement Meridian more effectively.
“While it’s an open-source solution, it’s also pretty complex. It requires a lot of information wrangling,” said Luka Cempre, Adswerve’s head of information modernization and cloud strategy. “It’s not a software-as-a-service solution… so that you must have someone who knows what’s happening in there to walk through it, to know where to run it, execute it … after which help Alaska bring all these complex outputs into a very nice method to optimize their budget.”
As it really works to appreciate that $100 million in addressable promoting revenue, Alaska has began to optimize its ad budget in line with Meridian’s findings. The airline has shifted more spend toward a mid-funnel technique to move consumers to finish bookings.
“We have a brand team and we’ve got the performance team,” Bickford explained. “How can we connect those two different groups more coherently, share the message across each and really move those folks that are traditionally within the brand space from awareness to consideration?”
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