Summary
A leading QSR brand partnered with Arima to gain a clearer, faster, and more localized understanding of how its rapidly evolving media mix was driving business outcomes. By using Arima's unlimited-use platform, the brand moved beyond static, one-off models to continuously optimize channel investments, test new media strategies, and confidently plan future spend across regions and franchise networks.
Challenge
The QSR marketer needed a new marketing mix modeling partner to better understand the business impact of increasingly complex and fast-moving media campaigns, both overall and at a local level.
Their core objectives included:
- Identifying which channels were driving the strongest return and incremental sales
- Understanding how reallocating media dollars could unlock additional growth
- Quantifying the impact of non-media factors such as competitive activity, local promotions, and macroeconomic conditions
As the brand expanded testing into new channels and varied media weights by market, additional challenges emerged:
- Traditional MMM workflows were too slow and inflexible to support rapid iteration
- Each model refresh came with added costs and long turnaround times
- MMM outputs were disconnected from forward-looking planning and scenario testing
The brand needed a solution that could keep pace with real-world decision-making, without sacrificing rigor or locality.
Solution
Arima's dynamic, unlimited-use Marketing Mix Modeling platform gave the QSR brand the flexibility and speed required to support modern, localized media planning.
With Arima, the marketer was able to:
- Continuously refine MMM inputs in near real time to reflect changing channel mixes and market conditions
- Run multiple concurrent MMMs across locations, franchisees, regions, and channel strategies
- Model performance at a local level, capturing geographic nuance that national-level models often miss
- Eliminate per-model costs through a subscription-based, unlimited-use MMM approach
Arima's integrated planning workflows connected historical measurement directly to forward-looking scenario analysis, allowing teams to move seamlessly from insight to action.
Success
Using Arima's MMM platform, the QSR marketer transformed how they measured, tested, and planned media investments:
- Gained on-demand performance insights to support faster, more confident optimization decisions
- Incorporated holdout market tests to measure incremental lift from new channel mixes and emerging media (e.g., audio and radio)
- Enabled "what-if" scenario planning to project sales outcomes if high-performing strategies were scaled across regions
- Expanded testing without added cost, allowing the team to validate strategies before committing to full-scale budget shifts
With unlimited modeling and locality-driven insights, the brand moved from static measurement to continuous optimization, aligning media decisions more closely with real-world performance and future growth goals.
