How Marketing Mix Modeling transformed the decision-making process at Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs

How can you protect your marketing competitiveness when budgets are tightening, teams are siloed, and impact measurements remain unclear? Faced with these challenges, the Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs (PVCP) group chose to transform its media management extensively. In collaboration with Ekimetrics, it developed a strategy based on Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), boosting its ability to make informed decisions at the right time for each brand and market.

3 key points to note about this collaboration between the Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs group and Ekimetrics:

• Marketing Mix Modeling now allows Pierre & Vacances and Center Parcs brands to optimize each euro invested in offline and online marketing at the European level.
• A well-supervised MMM approach not only transforms ROI management… but creates organizational cross-functionality.
• In just 6 months, the platform went from a management tool to a key strategic lever.

Why did Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs need a more reliable media management?

A series of structural obstacles were limiting the PVCP group’s capacity to take full advantage of its marketing investments, including:

• Two brands, two accommodation offers, one shared drive for performance: Pierre & Vacances and Center Parcs share a common purpose—hospitality and family destinations—but rely on two very different mechanics: one focused on seasonal residences, the other on premium nature parks. This duality complicated the orchestration of campaigns at the group level.
• Siloed governance between brand, performance, and country that hindered coordination: The distribution of responsibilities among the brand and performance teams, as well as strong local autonomy in each country, limited cross-functional coordination between teams. Each one was working with their own frames of reference, which complicated performance comparisons and limited the capacity to build coordinated ​​plans.
• Measurement tools that were useful but not sufficient for holistic decision-making: Media management was primarily based on digital attribution tools such as Google Analytics, which are effective for measuring the ​​immediate attribution of certain levers. But these solutions, with their focus on the short term and digital, did not alone allow comprehension of the global impact of campaigns—notably offline—or precise measurement of incremental performance.
• Analyses that were disparate and hard to align in a common framework: With no unified tool, the group depended on internally and externally produced analyses, which were sometimes difficult to compare. This fuelled a decision-making uncertainty, with a high risk of prioritizing the wrong levers.

“We needed to become more analytically mature to gain a better understanding of the customer journey and identify the real incremental levers”, explains Carole Rey, the group’s Head of Acquisition. “We were asking ourselves a lot of questions about cannibalization, about the long-term impact of our actions… but had little confidence in our answers.”

The turning point came at the end of 2023, when Carole Rey called on Ekimetrics to develop a common vision for marketing performance, adapted to the complexity of the group. The objective: to guide decision-making with data and maximize the media budget on the most strategic levers.

4 marketing and business challenges to overcome to transform the organization (and how they were dealt with)

Before being able to steer marketing decisions with agility and coherence at the European level, the Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs group encountered several structural and strategic obstacles. Four key issues hindered its potential for budgetary optimization and multichannel performance:

1. An organization siloed between brands, countries, and expertise

With two brands offering distinct models and several countries involved, PVCP operates in a naturally fragmented environment. If each team had its own priorities, tools, and methodologies, it was becoming difficult to share a common interpretation of performance. To better manage the whole, the group wanted to build a unified base that would promote exchanges between teams, business lines, and markets.

2. The absence of a common frame of reference to interpret performance

The group lacked a common language to analyze marketing levers, their roles in the customer journey, or the value of investments according to objectives. Reports relied on channels or partners, making comparisons vague and occasionally contradictory.

3. A critical need for marketing budget optimization

In a context of budgetary tension, it became crucial to target investments that generated real incremental value. Yet classical attribution (notably on the digital side) revealed its limitations, without providing a reliable interpretation of long-term impact.

4. Brands seeking new customer segments

To move beyond just a loyal customer base, brands must refine their media strategy: identifying the right messages, at the right time, on the right channels—and differentiating their activation levers according to their objectives: brand awareness, conversion, customer retention.

A 6-step methodology to embed data-driven management into marketing culture

To build a solid base and put media optimization on a long-term footing, Ekimetrics deployed a pragmatic six-step approach. Each phase was designed to involve the teams, structure the data, and ensure upskilling at every level of the organization.

1. Alignment from the ​​scoping stage: raising awareness, reassuring, and structuring

Ekimetrics organized a kick-off with all of the stakeholders (acquisition, CRM, brand, offline, agencies) to clarify the fundamental principles of Marketing Mix Modeling, the scope of work, and deliverables expected. The objective: To ​​involve and reassure while building a transparent and shared work environment.

2. ​​Immersion in the profession and intelligent data collection

Interviews with local teams provided Ekimetrics with a solid understanding of the operational model, business priorities, and intricacies of each market. This phase also served to initiate data collection, which was made faster with each cycle: from 6-8 weeks at the start to less than 2 weeks today.

3. Co-construction of models and business taxonomy

At the same time as the modeling, a custom taxonomy was defined with the PVCP teams to reflect their reality: names of levers, granularity of variables, hierarchy of investments, and key indicators. This essential step enabled a shared, intelligible, and coherent interpretation for all the users.

4. Training and adaptation to MMM

To ensure a sustainable adoption, Ekimetrics led several (collective and individual) training sessions with the teams (agency, CRM, Brand, Acquisition, Promotion…): introduction to the methodology, demonstration of result interpretation, and explanation of the differences between attribution and mix modeling. The approach aimed to be accessible, open, and progressive.

5. Deployment of the One.Vision platform and concrete use cases

Once the models were delivered, the teams were trained in using the One.Vision platform, integrated into their ecosystem. Workshops were led to guide the first scenarios autonomously (by country, lever, and campaign type): planning a campaign (known by the group as Key activation moments, KAM), ​​revisiting a media mix, or arbitrating a budgetary cut.

6. Continuous optimization and strategic adaptation

Each platform refresh allows for an improvement of the finer details: new “trialist” (new client)/”repeater” (loyal client) models, promotion deep dives, analyses of the synergy between channels (TV + YouTube, social media + search, etc.), or assessment of emerging levers, for example. This agile approach gives the group renewed steering capacity with each cycle, extracting more value each time.

6 learnings from Ekimetrics’ impact on the group’s performance

The collaboration with Ekimetrics was a real cultural turning point for the Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs group. Here are the key learnings from this transition towards data-driven marketing management:

1. The quality of the data accelerates the value created

The PVCP group’s data maturity enabled a quick start. Even for complex aspects such as ​​accommodation inventory or availability, the teams were able to provide reliable input, facilitating modeling without a long phase of technical remediation. Ekimetrics cleaned, consolidated, and aligned the data from internal tools (inventory, CRM, Meta…) to ensure overall consistency.

2. Adoption requires proximity and autonomy

With over 40 ​​employees trained in and involved with the One.Vision platform, adoption has been largely successful. Today, each country is autonomous in creating scenarios, assisted by a local ​​‘champion’, and supported by the central acquisition team and Ekimetrics. ​​This is a​​ key process to incorporate the tool into business practices.

3. ROI alone is not enough; it needs to be readable and actionable

Figures alone do not show the ability to guide concrete decision-making.  This approach’s strength is as much in the analysis as in the action it enables. The decisions made possible thanks to MMM models have, in fact, enabled the identification of significant budgetary flexibility: over €50 M optimized in one year and over 20 % of projected incremental ROI, proof of the approach’s robustness.

4. Segmenting levers and clients changes the nature of decisions

Launching differentiated models for trialists and repeaters has refined Center Parcs’ strategy. This distinction enables adaptation of activation plans to the specific challenges of ​​customer acquisition or retention, where previously only one media focus applied indistinctly to both.

5. Recommendations applied at the right time

From date choices for TV campaigns (such as KAMs) to format combinations (TV + YouTube/​​online video), the insights from models translate into operational decisions. A good example: Pierre & Vacances changed the date of their 2025 annual TV activation thanks to recommendations from their summer bookings model.

6. MMM’s benefits go far beyond modeling

The project makes progress at each refresh. Data collection takes less time, the models become more accurate, and the use cases expand. This continuous improvement dynamic makes Ekimetrics a veritable long-distance strategic partner.

What are the concrete results of this transformative project?

• Over €50M budget optimized from the first year of collaboration
• Over 20% projected ROI on average, thanks to recommendations
• Over 270 simulation scenarios performed on the platform
• Adoption of the platform by more than 40 regular users (Pierre & Vacances-Center Parcs teams, as well as the media agency)
• A strengthened governance with a ​​champion per country and cross-functional decision-making consistency

“We depended a lot on Google Analytics’ attribution for digital, with all the bias that entails. And for offline, measurement was based on ad hoc brand monitors and agency expertise. MMM has enabled the creation of a true common language, and above all, to arbitrate our choices with a 360-degree view based on data,” explains Carole Rey.

Learn more about Marketing Mix Modeling.