AT&T needed to determine whether advertising spend was generating returns competitive with direct customer acquisition channels. Without rigorous attribution modeling, the company risked misallocating hundreds of millions of dollars across a complex media mix — or underinvesting in advertising that was actually driving durable growth.
Vivaldi developed a marketing mix model that rigorously attributed customer acquisition outcomes to specific media channels and compared advertising ROI against direct acquisition costs. The methodology was subsequently extended to AT&T's DSL business, enabling cross-product marketing optimization.
The modeling confirmed advertising as a cost-competitive customer acquisition channel — and demonstrated that advertising delivered a dual benefit: short-term conversion and long-term brand equity accumulation. These findings enabled AT&T to reallocate marketing investment with confidence.
AT&T partnered with Vivaldi to build a marketing mix model that attributed customer acquisition outcomes to specific media channels and compared advertising ROI against direct acquisition costs. The work confirmed advertising as a cost-competitive acquisition channel with both short-term conversion impact and long-term brand equity accumulation, and the methodology was extended to AT&T’s DSL business for cross-product marketing optimisation.
AT&T is one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies, providing wireless, broadband, and entertainment services to over 200 million consumers and millions of businesses across the United States. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, AT&T generates annual revenues of approximately $120 billion and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker T. The company is consistently ranked among the most recognized and trusted brands in America.
Vivaldi developed a marketing mix model that rigorously attributed customer acquisition outcomes to specific media channels and benchmarked advertising ROI against direct acquisition costs. The work confirmed advertising as a cost-competitive acquisition channel and was subsequently extended to AT&T’s DSL business, giving the company a unified view of marketing efficiency across product lines.
The model isolated the contribution of each media channel to actual acquisition outcomes rather than relying on last-click attribution or directional CMO-level reporting. Once the channel-level contributions were quantified, advertising spend could be set side by side with direct acquisition cost on a like-for-like basis, which is the comparison most telecom marketers struggle to make credibly.
Telecom marketers run some of the largest media budgets in the economy, and the difference between optimal and suboptimal allocation is measured in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Without rigorous attribution, those budgets get steered by anecdote and last-click bias, which systematically underweights the channels that drive long-term brand equity and overweights direct response that captures already-decided buyers.
The model showed that advertising delivered both short-term conversion lift and long-term brand equity accumulation rather than one or the other. This finding is important because it reframes advertising from a marketing expense competing with direct acquisition into a strategic investment with compounding returns, which is the lens needed to defend brand spend during budget cycles.
