Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is a forecasting methodology used to estimate the impact of various marketing tactic scenarios on product sales. MMMs use statistical models, such as multivariate regressions, and use sales and marketing time-series data. They are often used to optimize advertising mix and promotional tactics with respect to sales, revenue, or profit to maximize their return on investment.

Using these statistical techniques allows marketers to account for advertising adstock and advertising's diminishing return over time, and also to account for carry-over effects and impact of past advertisements on the current sales campaign. Moreover, MMMs are able to calculate the magnitude of product cannibalization and halo effect.

The techniques were developed by specialized consulting companies along with academics and were first applied to consumer packaged goods, since manufacturers of those goods had access to accurate data on sales and marketing support. Improved availability of data, massively greater computing power, and the pressure to measure and optimize marketing spend has driven the explosion in popularity as a marketing tool. In recent times MMM has found acceptance as a trustworthy marketing tool among the major consumer marketing companies.

This recent years new boom in the MMM analysis in the media is due to Google´s research team, Yuxue Jin, Yueqing Wang, Yunting Sun, David Chan, Jim Koehler who published in April 2017 a new Bayesian approach for MMM applied especially to digital media.

Underlying MMMs is the concept of marketing mix, which is defined as the set of variables that a company can change to meet the demands of their customers. The term was developed by Neil Borden, who claims to have started using the phrase in around 1949 for his teaching and writing. He credits his colleague James Culliton for the idea of a "marketing mix" from portraying an executive as the following:

An executive is a mixer of ingredients, who sometimes follows a recipe as he goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe to the ingredients immediately available, and sometimes experiments with or invents ingredients no one else has tried.

Moreover, according to Borden, the marketing manager has to "weigh the behavioral forces and then juggle marketing elements in his mix with a keen eye on the resources with which he has to work."

These marketing mix "ingredients" were further described by E. Jerome McCarthy, who was first to suggest the four P's of marketing: