• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2025

Former agency executives from Dentsu, Kantar, and Nielsen who now work at a startup focused on marketing mix modeling (MMM) believe they have developed a way to enable small and medium-sized businesses to rethink media metrics that lead to better performance. 

Arima, the startup, allows users to run unrestricted models and conduct dynamic what-if scenario planning. The platform is powered by Synthetic Society, a privacy-by-design database that statistically mirrors real-world consumers using more than 10,000 attributes from trusted sources including census data, market research, mobility patterns, and purchase behavior.

MMM has been around for years, but is mostly geared toward the largest brands. Arima recently hired industry veteran Tom Butler as U.S. CRO to address the “renaissance” of the technology and make it more accessible for smaller agencies.

“We can bring MMM to smaller companies where it traditionally been out of reach for them,” Butler said, such as independent agencies.

Butler served as vice president of growth & strategy at Kantar Media, leading sales for their ad intelligence division. Earlier in his career, he held senior leadership positions at Nielsen and Merkle. 

The software is user-friendly and is convenient for pulling in data. Arima guides the agency as to what data to pull into the model, and Butler says the cost is much less.

"If you use one of the larger managed services, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to start," Butler said.

T.S. Kelly, Arima U.S. managing director, joined in 2023 from Dentsu. He said the software as a service (SaaS) platform is updated daily with new data.

Name recognition is the biggest challenge this year. There are always competitors in SaaS, and there are open-source options. 

"Sometimes clients will get results and they don't know what to do with it," Kelly said. "If you do this correctly it's about attribution as well as forecasting."