A 23% lift in marketing efficiency, shipped in six weeks.
A direct-to-consumer retail brand was reallocating paid-media budget by intuition. We built them a marketing mix model and a weekly self-serve dashboard their growth team still uses to defend every dollar.
By Joe Perone, Senior Principal Published Last updated 7-minute read
At a glance
Industry
Direct-to-consumer retail
Engagement
Rapid AI Pilot
Timeline
6 weeks
Headline outcome
+23% marketing efficiency
The challenge
The brand had grown past the point where intuition could safely allocate paid budget across Meta, Google, TikTok, programmatic display, and connected TV. Each channel team had its own attribution view. Weekly stand-ups produced spreadsheets nobody trusted. Spend was being moved in quarterly swings — too slow to catch underperforming creative, too coarse to capitalize on momentum.
Leadership wanted one source of truth for marketing efficiency, sharp enough to defend in a board meeting, simple enough that the growth team could run with it weekly without an analyst middleman.
The approach
A six-week Rapid AI Pilot, structured around the firm's standard cadence:
- Week 1 — Discovery. Mapped channels, data sources, and decision rhythms. Identified gaps in spend and conversion tagging.
- Weeks 2–3 — Data and design. Unified two years of spend, impression, and conversion data into a single modeling-ready dataset. Built a marketing mix model with adstock and saturation curves per channel.
- Weeks 4–5 — Build and test. Validated against held-out periods. Designed the weekly self-serve dashboard with the growth team in the room, not in a vacuum.
- Week 6 — Handoff. Trained two growth-team members to own the weekly refresh. Delivered a runbook covering model retraining, anomaly handling, and how to brief the CMO.
What we shipped
- A marketing mix model covering five paid channels, with weekly refresh logic.
- A self-serve dashboard the growth team uses Monday mornings to set the week's spend reallocation.
- A diagnostic view that flags creative fatigue and channel saturation before they hit the P&L.
- A documented handoff: data pipeline, model code, refresh runbook, and a one-page narrative the team uses to brief the CMO.
Outcomes
Efficiency
+23%
improvement in marketing efficiency across paid channels
Cadence
Weekly
spend reallocation, replacing quarterly swings
Ownership
In-house
growth team owns the weekly refresh after Week 6
"The level of strategic thinking Balboa Insights brought to every stage was exceptional. The pilot delivered clear ROI in six weeks."
VP of Analytics · High-Growth Retail Brand
Why it worked
Three choices made the difference. First, fixed scope — six weeks, four deliverables, no scope creep. Second, the senior principal built the model, not a junior analyst with an offshore team behind them. Third, the handoff was designed from Week 1: every artifact was built to live without us.
Could this work for your team?
The pattern travels well to any growth-stage brand with 4+ paid channels, two or more years of clean spend data, and a growth or marketing leader who's tired of defending decisions on vibes. If that's you, the Rapid AI Pilot is the same shape of engagement.