How Marketing Evolution is turning bad data into better decisions

“There are two types of people in the world today,” says Stephen Williams, CEO of marketing analytics platform Marketing Evolution. “There are people who have terrible marketing data, and people who know they have terrible marketing data.”

Modern marketing is a maze. Data fragmentation, chaotic cross-channel activity, and evolving privacy regulations all make it difficult to track the impact of spend. Because without reliable data, even the most sophisticated models fail to deliver; marketers pour millions into campaigns and can’t connect spend to real outcomes.

CMOs’ jobs have never been so complex, yet many still rely on traditional attribution and marketing mix modeling — slow, siloed tools built for a simpler era — to measure success.

Building an ROI engine

Founded in 2000, Marketing Evolution applies data and artificial intelligence to advertising, providing visibility into the effectiveness of messages in near real-time.

Marketing Evolution’s platform — now centralized as Mevo — let marketers feed in their campaign data and customer signals, then used advanced analytics to reveal which ads drove results, and how to spend better in the future. On average, its customers saw an 31% increase in profits due to advertising.

The company grew for more than a decade without any outside capital, onboarding more than 50 customers, including marquee brands such as Amgen, Citibank, COX, Timberland, and Warner Bros. In 2019, the company had raised $50.7M over four rounds of financing, including a $20.6M Series B in 2018 led by Insight Partners.

Fragmented data becomes real-time intelligence

Fast forward to 2025, and Mevo is a modern SaaS platform for planning, measurement, reporting, and insights. In December, Marketing Evolution announced a new round of funding, led by Insight, to accelerate product innovation and GTM expansion for its AI-ready data infrastructure. “Marketing Evolution provides the connective tissue between data and AI applications for marketers,” explains Williams, who was appointed CEO in 2022.

He began his career at Marketing Evolution in the innovation lab before rising through the ranks. “I led rapid prototyping, building out all kinds of interesting devices. And along the way, I started working in production engineering, then [was] elevated to head of data science, head of engineering, CTO, and then finally, CEO. My product engineering experience is what got me to this wonderful role.”

He lays out two different product use cases for Mevo. First, it’s a “highly scalable data platform that enables AI modeling analytics for technical users inside marketing organizations, and … allows non-technical users to ask questions of the data [through Mevo’s agentic AI interface].”

The second is measurement optimization. “We stitch together and recover user journeys so we know probabilistically what someone was exposed to [and] we’re able to then measure how much each of those touch points impacted their decision to convert.”

This granular assessment goes beyond legacy models, which often fail to recognize the crucial contribution of upper-funnel activities like TV and radio.

“We excel in cleaning that data, fitting it to the standard schema, and allowing marketers … to ask questions of the data, and their marketing efforts.”

Mevo enables marketers to ask questions like “How could I have done something better last quarter?” and run scenarios to improve their outcomes, Williams explains. Its optimization engine identifies opportunities and offers suggestions for changes to the placement, creative elements, or message of live campaigns.

From early adopter to AI-first

While Marketing Evolution was an early adopter of AI, Williams believes marketers have yet to realize its full potential when it comes to data.

“Where we’re going to see a real impact is [when] those marketers realize that they have a lot of data at their fingertips. They just have to be able to access that data and ensure that the data is organized in a way that represents their business, [to start] optimizing in real time, [and] figuring out not just what they should be doing three months from now, but what they should be doing tomorrow.”

Since Williams became CEO, Marketing Evolution has implemented AI across processes in its product, engineering, and go-to-market teams.

“We have transformed ourselves as a company and a brand to [have] an AI-first mentality,” he says. “We have agents that can do prospecting and all kinds of other amazing things — we used to have a room full of BDRs [business development reps] doing that work.”

It’s not about cutting headcount, he reiterates, but powering better work. “A lot of marketers are scared this AI is going to replace their jobs,” he says. “I think, instead, it’s going to enhance the output of any given contributor and allow them to do things with the data they couldn’t even imagine … AI reduces a certain degree of the cognitive load across everyone in the business and allows for more creative thinking.”

Building tomorrow’s marketing intelligence

As the world transitions from AI to agentic AI, Williams believes the winners will be those who get their data house in order. “That data right there is so powerful for AI, that is what the AI needs in order to start answering questions … Your model, no matter how cool it is, no matter how new it is, no matter how fancy it is … is powerless without data underneath it.”

“Your model, no matter how cool it is, no matter how new it is, no matter how fancy it is … is powerless without data underneath it.”

For brands and agencies, the imperative is clear: Take control of proprietary data now if you want it to drive value later. “We don’t know where AI is going to be two years from now,” he says.

“It’s important to set up a foundation right now in every single business to make sure that your data is being organized, it’s being taxonomized, and it is being fit to an ontology that is representative of what your business does and maybe even what your business wants to be doing in a couple of years.”

By organizing the world’s marketing data, Marketing Evolution is building the bridge between today’s AI hype and tomorrow’s business outcomes.

*Note: Insight has invested in Marketing Evolution. This article is part of our ScaleUp:AI 2025 Partner Series, highlighting insights from the companies and leaders shaping the future of AI.