There is an increasing interest among marketing professionals about the need to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and investments.

The “marketing analytics” industry is currently in full swing due to the increasing importance of measuring the social media ROI, and the proven fact that “earned” media act in synergy with traditional offline and online media. This has led large advertisers to actively search for new technologies that enable them to holistically manage all the touchpoints with which their brands interact with consumers.

With this objective in mind, the industry has evolved from simple spreadsheets, moving on to traditional regression analysis, to finally reach to sophisticated modelling techniques called “Virtual Markets”.

In a practical way, this document details the main differences between the econometric models of “Marketing Mix Modelling” and those based on Agent-based Modelling, or as we call them “Virtual Markets”.