The Measurement Reset: What It Really Takes to Make MMM Work
CANNES, France – Most marketers cannot pass a basic undergraduate exam in their own profession. That uncomfortable reality sits at the center of Mark Ritson’s decade-long mission to raise the bar on marketing education — and it explains why he recently decided to subject his own business to the kind of econometric scrutiny he once viewed with skepticism.
The founder of MiniMBA, which has trained some 50,000 marketers across 65 countries since launching 10 years ago, challenged Mutinex to analyze his company’s marketing effectiveness for free. The deal was simple: if the work proved useful, Ritson would talk about it publicly and incorporate the findings into his curriculum. What he got back changed his view of a measurement discipline he had long regarded as expensive, slow, and prone to producing wildly inconsistent answers.
“I wasn’t anti, but I wasn’t particularly pro,” said Ritson, founder of MiniMBA, in this panel discussion with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026.
The knowledge gap that drives the business
Ritson’s business exists because of a problem most industry conversations ignore: the majority of working marketers lack foundational knowledge of their craft. MiniMBA has been administering basic undergraduate-level marketing exams to professionals, and the results are sobering.
“The pass rates are about 35% in the US, in Canada, in Australia, in the UK,” Ritson said. “About 60% of them don’t know what positioning is, literally. About 55% of marketers don’t know what distinctive brand assets are. About 40% can’t tell you what the four Ps are.”
The company operates as both a B2B and B2C business, with roughly half of its 8,000 to 9,000 annual students – typically marketers in their 40s – paying their own tuition. The other half come through enterprise contracts with blue-chip clients who put their teams through the 12-week program. Recent deals include a seven-figure agreement to train 1,500 marketers at a global FMCG company and a partnership with Omnicom covering more than 1,200 marketers across Oceania.
Why the skeptic signed up for analysis
Despite his reservations about econometrics, Ritson knew enough CMOs who had been impressed by the discipline to give it a fair hearing.
Emarketer reports that 46.9% of US marketers plan to invest more in marketing mix modeling over the next year, and 27.6% named MMM the most reliable measurement methodology available.
“I have several very skeptical CMO clients, and they’d all been impressed with what econometrics had done,” Ritson said. “So I was ready to be impressed, but I was quietly expecting it to be a total waste of time.”
The resulting analysis examined MiniMBA’s UK and Australian operations, incorporating paid, owned, and earned media alongside CRM data, events, and external factors like employment rates and consumer confidence. The findings revealed that MiniMBA spent 25% more on paid channels in early 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, yet achieved only a 2% revenue increase, with cost per acquisition rising significantly.
A measurement discipline in transformation
Ritson’s conversion from skeptic to advocate arrives as the MMM category undergoes rapid evolution. Mordor Intelligence estimates the global marketing mix modeling software market at $2.23 billion in 2026, growing to $4.22 billion by 2031. Cloud-based deployment now accounts for nearly 80% of the market, and large enterprises represent more than two-thirds of spending.
The shift reflects broader signal loss across digital advertising. Privacy regulation, platform walled gardens, and fragmented customer journeys have weakened user-level attribution, pushing advertisers toward aggregate measurement approaches. Google’s release of Meridian, its open-source MMM framework, to all marketers in January 2025 has accelerated adoption.
Yet better tooling has not closed the capability gap. Emarketer reports that only 28% of marketers say their organization is very effective at converting MMM insights into action. Forrester expects confidence in marketing measurement to decline by 7% in 2026, noting that many brands lack the data infrastructure and organizational culture to benefit from advanced modeling.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Mutinex. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France – Most marketers cannot pass a basic undergraduate exam in their own profession. That uncomfortable reality sits at the center of Mark Ritson’s decade-long mission to raise the bar on marketing education — and it explains why he recently decided to subject his own business to the kind of econometric scrutiny he once viewed with skepticism.
The founder of MiniMBA, which has trained some 50,000 marketers across 65 countries since launching 10 years ago, challenged Mutinex to analyze his company’s marketing effectiveness for free. The deal was simple: if the work proved useful, Ritson would talk about it publicly and incorporate the findings into his curriculum. What he got back changed his view of a measurement discipline he had long regarded as expensive, slow, and prone to producing wildly inconsistent answers.
“I wasn’t anti, but I wasn’t particularly pro,” said Ritson, founder of MiniMBA, in this panel discussion with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2026.
The knowledge gap that drives the business
Ritson’s business exists because of a problem most industry conversations ignore: the majority of working marketers lack foundational knowledge of their craft. MiniMBA has been administering basic undergraduate-level marketing exams to professionals, and the results are sobering.
“The pass rates are about 35% in the US, in Canada, in Australia, in the UK,” Ritson said. “About 60% of them don’t know what positioning is, literally. About 55% of marketers don’t know what distinctive brand assets are. About 40% can’t tell you what the four Ps are.”
The company operates as both a B2B and B2C business, with roughly half of its 8,000 to 9,000 annual students – typically marketers in their 40s – paying their own tuition. The other half come through enterprise contracts with blue-chip clients who put their teams through the 12-week program. Recent deals include a seven-figure agreement to train 1,500 marketers at a global FMCG company and a partnership with Omnicom covering more than 1,200 marketers across Oceania.
Why the skeptic signed up for analysis
Despite his reservations about econometrics, Ritson knew enough CMOs who had been impressed by the discipline to give it a fair hearing.
Emarketer reports that 46.9% of US marketers plan to invest more in marketing mix modeling over the next year, and 27.6% named MMM the most reliable measurement methodology available.
“I have several very skeptical CMO clients, and they’d all been impressed with what econometrics had done,” Ritson said. “So I was ready to be impressed, but I was quietly expecting it to be a total waste of time.”
The resulting analysis examined MiniMBA’s UK and Australian operations, incorporating paid, owned, and earned media alongside CRM data, events, and external factors like employment rates and consumer confidence. The findings revealed that MiniMBA spent 25% more on paid channels in early 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, yet achieved only a 2% revenue increase, with cost per acquisition rising significantly.
A measurement discipline in transformation
Ritson’s conversion from skeptic to advocate arrives as the MMM category undergoes rapid evolution. Mordor Intelligence estimates the global marketing mix modeling software market at $2.23 billion in 2026, growing to $4.22 billion by 2031. Cloud-based deployment now accounts for nearly 80% of the market, and large enterprises represent more than two-thirds of spending.
The shift reflects broader signal loss across digital advertising. Privacy regulation, platform walled gardens, and fragmented customer journeys have weakened user-level attribution, pushing advertisers toward aggregate measurement approaches. Google’s release of Meridian, its open-source MMM framework, to all marketers in January 2025 has accelerated adoption.
Yet better tooling has not closed the capability gap. Emarketer reports that only 28% of marketers say their organization is very effective at converting MMM insights into action. Forrester expects confidence in marketing measurement to decline by 7% in 2026, noting that many brands lack the data infrastructure and organizational culture to benefit from advanced modeling.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Mutinex. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
