• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, November 3, 2025

A black-box marketing-mix model's (MMM) data was not sufficient for Columbia Sportswear's Mountain Hardwear brand to make real-time media-buying decisions as campaigns ran.

So Drew Schneier, the company's senior manager of ecommerce marketing, began using a MMM spinoff called Agile Mix Modeling (AMM).

For decades, MMM has forced marketers to make budget decisions in the dark.

“We had to look at last-touch performance, a way of modeling the data we knew was flawed,” Schneier said. “It just didn’t tell the whole story and its contribution to the business.”

Having access to data in real-time increased overall for the year. The upper-funnel channel investments rose 15%, with major traffic increases to its website -- between 20% and 30% consistently -- which goes against results that other companies have seen this year because of the “zero-click” phenomenon.

A zero-click Google search is when a user finds the answer to their query directly on the search-results page without needing to click through to a website.  

AMM gave Schneier a wider snapshot of performance and incrementality. Much of the lower-funnel media, which the campaigns were tied to because the data monitored last touch performance, allowed him to see over and under investments in channels.

Schneier said the AMM -- made possible through advancements in statistical approaches using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) -- enabled him to speed up the process of proving investments and optimizing in real time.

“It allowed us to invest more,” he said, increasing investments in Meta Platforms, YouTube, and connected TV (CTV). “It’s because we can see more data in upper-funnel tactics.”  

AMM gave Schneier enough data to make “tactical shifts” in media buys, recognizing the ideal times to move budgets from search to connected TV (CTV) without waiting 12 weeks to pull and review the data. The company added a Pinterest campaign, and moved more of the budget to Google Demand Gen.

In May, Mountain Hardwear launched the “Go Broad Spectrum” campaign, educating consumers about protecting themselves from the sun, with heavy buys in video on sites like YouTube.

Mountain Hardwear marketers during that Q2 2025 quarter moved more than 35% of its budget into upper-funnel tactics, compared with 5% in past years.

"It gave us confidence to see the data," he said. "If we had not had the performance data from those upper-funnel channels, several months of data, we would not have invested that much." 

Ars X Machina, an independent media agency based in San Francisco, began building AMM three years ago and ran it in beta last year. Sara Owens, SVP of analytics and data science at AXM, said the model had publicly launched last month.