Recast

Description

Recast is a sophisticated incrementality platform designed to help businesses plan, experiment, validate, and optimize their marketing performance through rigorous measurement methodologies. The platform positions itself as “the world’s most rigorous incrementality platform,” emphasizing its focus on statistical accuracy and transparency in marketing measurement. Recast combines two powerful measurement approaches—Causal Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and GeoLift testing—into a unified platform that enables marketers to make data-driven decisions about their advertising investments. The company serves Fortune 50 businesses, pharmaceutical companies, and household CPG brands, helping them plan, forecast, and optimize more than $4 billion in annual marketing spend.

At the core of Recast’s offering is its advanced Causal MMM technology, which provides marketers with insights into the incremental impact of their marketing activities across channels. The platform is designed to address common challenges in marketing measurement, such as the inability to verify traditional MMM models, slow turnaround times, and lack of statistical rigor. Recast emphasizes model quality and validation, providing weekly model performance scorecards and tools to validate results through lift testing. The platform’s key features include time-varying ROIs that allow marketing performance to dynamically change over time, promotional event modeling that estimates both the immediate impact and pull-forward/pull-backward effects of promotions, upper and lower funnel interaction analysis, and multi-stage modeling that combines MMM with a Kaplan-Meier style survival model for understanding multi-stage conversion funnels. This comprehensive approach helps marketers understand not just what happened in the past, but also forecast future performance and optimize budget allocation across channels.

What sets Recast apart is its emphasis on transparency and statistical rigor. The company describes its platform as a “glass box,” with openly published model documentation and a focus on model performance transparency throughout the model building process and ongoing platform use. More than 20% of Recast’s team holds a PhD in math or statistics, reflecting the company’s commitment to advanced statistical methodologies. The platform is designed to be both fast and accurate, providing weekly updates to models rather than the quarterly or annual updates common with traditional MMM approaches. Recast also emphasizes its validation capabilities, allowing marketers to compare model predictions with actual results and calibrate future models based on lift test results. This focus on validation and transparency helps address a common criticism of marketing mix modeling—that it’s difficult to verify the accuracy of model results.

The platform appears to target mid-sized to large enterprises with substantial marketing budgets, particularly those spending across multiple channels who need sophisticated analysis to optimize their investments.

Pros

• Combines Causal MMM and GeoLift testing in a unified platform
• Emphasizes statistical rigor and transparency in modeling
• Provides weekly model updates rather than quarterly/annual
• Includes built-in validation tools to verify model accuracy
• Offers time-varying ROIs that account for seasonal changes
• Models both immediate and delayed effects of promotions
• Captures interactions between upper and lower funnel channels
• Supports multi-stage modeling for complex conversion funnels
• SOC 2 compliant and a badged Meta Measurement Partner
• Team includes PhD-level statisticians and data scientists
• Used by Fortune 50 companies and major CPG brands

Cons

• May be cost-prohibitive for small to medium-sized businesses
• Requires significant historical marketing data for accurate modeling
• Complex platform likely requires substantial onboarding and training
• No transparent pricing information available on website
• Limited information about data integration capabilities
• May require technical expertise to fully leverage advanced features