Effectively allocating a marketing budget is like directing a complex supply chain. Every dollar must be routed to the right place at the right time to maximize impact.
For a company in the healthcare industry, this meant managing a $1.4 billion marketing budget across 47 brands, 150 brand-country combinations, and 30 media channels. To accomplish this, they contracted Marketing Attribution as they specialize in helping companies measure and optimize the effectiveness of their marketing. For consistent measurement across all marketing channels, they use mix modeling as well as run large-scale person-level randomized controlled trials to put a value on specific 1st and 3rd party audiences.
The complexity of the client’s business made this task difficult to measure the true effectiveness of their spending. The goal was clear: gain a precise understanding of media performance and optimize every dollar spent to improve global ROI. Without a powerful analytical tool, they were navigating trillions of potential decisions with an incomplete map.
Building a Decision Intelligence Engine with Gurobi
To solve this global optimization problem, Marketing Attribution chose Gurobi for its advanced decision intelligence technology. The partnership focused on creating a scalable, high-performance engine capable of making optimal budget allocation decisions in minutes, not months.
Beyond tracking numbers, the client wanted to build a strategic framework for decision-making. Using Gurobi’s analytical software, Marketing Attribution combined proven statistical techniques with advanced optimization algorithms. This allowed them to measure incremental impact to accurately determine the sales lift generated from various media and marketing activities; model complex scenarios as to simulate and optimize thousands of nonlinear response curves to predict outcomes with high accuracy; and generate actionable plans, turning vast, complex data sets into clear, optimized media plans that guided investment decisions.
The resulting system gave the healthcare company a tool to identify the most efficient investments and allocate spend with confidence. The solution was built to be scalable, leveraging Gurobi’s global experience across diverse industries to ensure robust performance.
Transforming Data into Decisive Action and ROI
The implementation of the Gurobi-powered optimization engine delivered significant and measurable outcomes, fundamentally transforming the client’s approach to marketing investment.
- 13% Annual Increase in Media ROI: The solution directly translated into a substantial improvement in the efficiency of marketing spend.
- Strategic Shift to Digital: Digital media’s share of the budget increased from 44% to 71%, reflecting a data-driven pivot to higher-performing channels.
- Enhanced Decision-Making Speed: The system processed immense complexity, delivering optimized media plans in under two minutes.
“Most Innovative Things We’ve Ever Done”
This new capability moved the team from reactive analysis to proactive, strategic planning. The optimization system is updated quarterly, serving as a vital and continuous tool for guiding global marketing strategy.
“The global optimization problem we solved for this client is one of the most innovative things we’ve ever done,” said Ross Link, Founder of Marketing Attribution. “And we couldn’t have done it without Gurobi.”
The partnership between Marketing Attribution and Gurobi demonstrates the value of applying decision intelligence to marketing’s biggest challenges resulting in a system that empowered the clients to make smarter, faster, and more profitable decisions.
