In this talk, Ben will unpack the real state of Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) democratization: how open-source platforms like Robyn, Meridian, and PyMC-Marketing have collapsed the cost barrier to entry, while the expertise required to produce a trustworthy model has stayed just as high.

Ben will walk through the crowded MMM vendor landscape and the incentives at play, the "silent killer" of most MMM projects (data access and cross-team data archaeology), why AI coding assistants can scaffold a model but can't make the judgment calls that make it trustworthy, and the business-context knowledge (adstock/carryover, saturation shape, structural breaks) that only a human on the team can supply.

He'll close with a practical starting point for teams ready to build their first model in-house.