When it comes to marketing effectiveness, the most successful brands are the ones who measure smarter. In my experience, they do three things better than anyone else:
- They go broad and deep, measuring both media and non-media drivers (e.g. sponsorship)
- They ensure measurement and insights are timed to coincide with key decisions that need to be made
- They focus on generating actionable insights that impact business outcomes.
I discussed how Hannah Wilkinson, Marketing Analytics Director at sports betting and gaming entertainment company BetMGM, is working to achieve these goals at the 2025 ANA Measurement & Analytics Conference.
How BetMGM is tackling sponsorship measurement
BetMGM invests in a range of different sponsorship types, including traditional, media-focused activation such as sponsoring TV shows and podcasts. Increasingly, the company is also investing in brand ambassadors, such as Mad Men actor John Hamm, sports teams, such as the Kansas City Chiefs, and sports leagues, such as Major League Baseball.
“Historically, media partnerships have been the easiest to measure,” says Wilkinson. “You can quite easily get data for that, feed it into an MMM and get an ROI.” But when it comes to measuring the impact of brand ambassadors, sports teams and leagues Wilkinson notes it’s been more challenging.
The company has teamed up with vendors to better understand the exposure, earned media, and media value that these types of sponsorship generate. But Wilkinson wants to go further: “What we’re trying to do is take it to the next level [to understand] what revenue has that investment driven for the business?”
To enable this, Wilkinson identified two necessary actions:
- Get hold of key data (e.g. spend) about the brand ambassadors, sports teams and leagues they were investing in.
- Feed this data into an MMM to provide “a much fuller picture” of how the investments were performing against marketing and business KPIs.
This approach exemplifies how brands can build a more comprehensive picture of marketing performance by tackling non-media drivers like sponsorships that were previously too complicated or inaccessible to measure.
How BetMGM times insights with decision-making
The tension between the demand for immediate insights and the need for thorough, strategic analysis is something that a lot of marketers recognize.
While you can get rapid answers to important questions such as ‘How many customers did we acquire last week?’ and ‘what was the CPA?’, Wilkinson notes that the answers “don’t give a complete picture of overall marketing performance.”
In contrast, advanced analytics techniques like MMM, which provide more robust and strategic insights, require patience. It can take several weeks for short- and long-term effects to materialize and for the results to become clear in your model.
Timing when you get your insights is therefore a key factor. “We time MMM readouts with the key strategic points in our calendar and when it’s getting to the point that we have to make a new investment decisions,” Wilkinson says.
This is great advice. In addition, I would stress it’s important to factor in business context to ensure insights are as relevant and as actionable as they can be. Understanding the ‘why’ behind the numbers, and the specific market conditions or competitive landscape, transforms raw data into strategic intelligence.
How BetMGM ties insights to business outcomes
Marketers often struggle to clearly demonstrate the contribution of their work to business objectives, but there are two things BetMGM does that I think are applicable to all brands.
First, they ensure marketing metrics link to overall business objectives. “It’s really important to make sure that you’re keeping across all of the high-level business KPIs,” says Wilkinson. “We want to make sure that marketing is not operating in isolation and doing its own thing against its own KPIs.
“One of the things that we do is weekly sit downs with our C-suite where we go through the entire business performance. Everyone has their own KPIs that we discuss together.”
To help, I recommend developing a hierarchy of metrics to clearly articulate how marketing drives growth for your business, inform the data and measurement you need, and create a shared language with the c-suite. In tandem, developing a shared learning agenda so that all relevant stakeholders are clear and in agreement on what you are aiming for and how you plan to achieve it can be very beneficial.
Second, BetMGM uses three different methodologies, last touch attribution, MMM and incrementality testing, to give the best possible view of performance. But this doesn’t mean they always deliver a clear answer.
“Sometimes they come up with conflicting results and it can be difficult to reconcile them,” says Wilkinson. “We do spend a lot of time and effort on that and test one against the other.”
Given some measurement techniques are better suited to answer certain questions than others, having access to range of different techniques is helpful. It enables you to choose the one that’s most appropriate and deliver robust insights with which you can make decisions with confidence.
Lessons from a leader
BetMGM’s journey provides some great lessons for any brand wanting to ensure their marketing is more effective. I’ve no doubt their commitment to measuring drivers beyond traditional media, balancing speed, rigor and decision-making, and fostering a unified view of performance that’s tied to business performance will set them up for future success.