Dive Brief:
- Google is updating its marketing mix model Meridian with new agentic artificial intelligence capabilities, among other changes to its measurements suite, according to a blog post.
- Meridian’s agentic enhancements are designed to help marketers better audit the quality of their data, more easily resolve errors and guide model building in real time. Google is also souping up Meridian on the back end to increase speed and efficiency.
- In addition, marketers can now factor more brand-building signals directly into Meridian, providing a clearer window into the performance of upper-funnel channels like TV and out of home. Google says the changes support its efforts to turn measurement interfaces from a “reactive report card” into something more dynamic.
Dive Insight:
Google’s agentic makeover for its advertising products is extending to Meridian, its open-source MMM for gauging the impact of media by channel. Like many AI-powered upgrades, the Meridian changes are focused on delivering better outcomes and efficiency for brands, including through what the blog post described as “significant updates” on the back end.
At the same time, Google is expanding Meridian’s scope to be able to analyze more upper-funnel brand-building activities, including TV and OOH billboard campaigns, which are typically harder to measure than traditional digital marketing.
The search giant also said it is making Meridian GeoX, a publisher-agnostic incrementality solution for geographically-based measurement experiments, available globally following a beta test. Incorporating Meridian GeoX insights can boost the overall accuracy of MMM results, according to Google.
The announcements follow Meridian partnering with Circana’s Liquid Mix, a self-serve AI MMM platform, last week. Around its Marketing Live event in May, Google outlined a vision for making its measurement products more unified and AI-ready.
Google introduced Meridian two years ago when third-party cookie deprecation was underway, with the MMM positioned as a more privacy-minded, durable measurement solution. Even as the cookie debate has faded — Google nixed plans to kill off the targeting tactic not long after Meridian’s announcement — marketers are still investing in alternative approaches, and Meridian has remained in the conversation amid renewed interest in MMMs.
Some brands, including Alaska Airlines, have attested to the power of Meridian in uncovering new revenue opportunities. Still, the offering has stoked the usual concerns of Google effectively grading its own homework.
Beyond Meridian, Google is making other tweaks to its measurement suite, including by directly integrating Data Manager into Google Analytics and Display & Video 360. GA and DV360 are also getting an enhanced conversions feature aimed at bolstering ad relevance while securing matching customer data. The company in addition is debuting a Data Strength Uplift Metric in Google Ads that calculates the conversions recovered by a marketer’s first-party data setup.
