Data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing means making marketing decisions on evidence rather than on habit or on the loudest dashboard, and being able to say, for each figure, where it came from. In a media plan, that evidence is of three kinds: measurements from experiments, projections from a model fitted on the brand’s history, and benchmarks borrowed while the brand’s own evidence is still thin. A plan is data-driven when it says which is which.

The distinction matters because more data is not the same as better evidence. Platform dashboards report attributed conversions: several platforms claim the same sale, customers who would have bought anyway are counted, and saturated channels keep reporting a healthy average. Data-driven media planning starts by reading those figures as attributed, not incremental, and by looking for the counterfactual: a media mix model that separates the media from everything else that moved sales, and incrementality experiments that measure what a channel caused.

In the Media Planner, the plan is built from the brand’s data warehouse or from audited benchmarks, every figure carries a tag (measured, projected or benchmark), and each recommendation states its hypothesis, its expected impact and a confidence rating, so the team can accept, defer or reject it and keep the record. The media planning guide shows what data-driven planning changes at each step of the plan.