How LA Times reduced CPAs by 30% with Recast

We work with an iconic news organization that reduced CPAs 30%+ YoY and brought paid LTV:CAC into efficiency. Three things helped them achieve this: 1. Stronger use of first party data at different stages in the customer lifecycle. 2. Better matching of creative with different marketing channel contexts. 3. Introducing Recast to their marketing org. That company is Los Angeles Times, and while the efficiency gains are impressive, my favorite part of this story is actually how they use the Recast platform. The LA Times was new to MMM when they came to Recast, so took a methodical approach to building trust in the platform. They “stress tested” their models: making small budget changes based on Recast’s forecasts and then assessing how accurate those forecasts really were. As Recast passed these small stress tests, the LA Times started taking larger swings with the platform, shifting channel budgets and launching new experiments. A measured approach to model validation like this is hugely important to any MMM project, and it allowed the LA Times to build real trust in Recast over time. To read more on our partnership–including how the LA Times unlocked new upper funnel channels and used their MMM to inform their experimentation roadmap–check out our new case study (link is in the comments). And special thanks to Travis Bernard and Will Dobson!