Marketing Evolution Introduces the Substrate, a New System of Record for Marketing Performance

The Substrate provides person-level marketing performance context without personally identifiable information, creating a durable foundation for measurement, planning, optimization, and AI decision-making.

NEW YORK, Aug. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Marketing Evolution announced the broad availability of the Substrate, a new platform designed to serve as the System of Record for Marketing Performance.

For decades, marketers have invested heavily in systems that manage customers, content, and campaigns. Yet many organizations still lack a single, trusted source for understanding how marketing drives business outcomes. As privacy changes, platform proliferation, and AI adoption reshape the industry, determining that causal relationship has become even more difficult.

The Substrate connects and organizes marketing data from paid and owned channels, CRM systems, offline activity, and third-party sources. It reconstructs missing customer journeys to create a more complete view of how marketing drives customer behavior and business outcomes. The result is a persistent, purpose-built marketing intelligence layer that moves organizations from reporting to reasoning across measurement, simulation, optimization, and AI-driven decision-making. Organizations can access this intelligence through Darwin, Marketing Evolution's conversational interface, or connect it to their own models, agents, and applications.

At the core of the Substrate is Marketing Evolution's proprietary Journey Reconstruction and Enriched Data technology, developed through more than 25 years of measurement science. First deployed in 2020, the technology reconstructs customer journeys when privacy restrictions, disconnected systems, or limited channel visibility leave data incomplete, without relying on cookies or personally identifiable information. The Substrate requires as little as three months of historical data, compared with the years traditionally required for marketing mix modeling (MMM), and achieves less than 1% parameter recovery error.*

By transforming fragmented marketing data into a unified, AI-ready performance foundation, the Substrate enables:

• More consistent decisions: Unifies MMM, multi-touch attribution (MTA), and incrementality in one model, reducing conflicting results.
• More relevant recommendations: Reflects each organization's KPIs, definitions, and decision logic.
• Broader measurement coverage: Extends person-level measurement to TV, radio, and out-of-home, where exposure data is scarce.
• More confident planning: Simulates outcomes across channels and markets before budgets are committed.
• More trustworthy data: Continuously validates incoming data, flags issues, and preserves definitions and lineage.
• Faster time to insight: Builds credible models from months—not years—of historical data.
• Continuity as AI evolves: Preserves each organization's accumulated intelligence across models and platforms.

Although broadly available for the first time today, the Substrate has operated in production since 2024 through custom enterprise deployments in some of the industry's most complex and regulated environments, including Fortune 500 insurance and financial services companies and global agency holding companies. At one company, it detected and resolved data-quality issues and anomalies affecting 29% of the total dataset, saved 240 hours of analyst time, and cut the reporting cycle from weeks to four days, contributing to a $2.38 million annual run-rate margin benefit.

"We originally built this platform to operationalize our measurement science at enterprise scale," said Stephen Williams, CEO of Marketing Evolution. "What emerged was something larger. As AI changed what data enables, we realized that measurement wasn't simply an application—it was infrastructure. The causal understanding that powers marketing measurement also provides the context people and AI need to reason from the same performance data, not just report on it."

"Marketing Evolution's Substrate enabled us to build a unified decisioning platform that can run across every brand in our portfolio," said Brett Marchand, CEO of Plus Company. "By leveraging its deep understanding of customer journeys, we've created more effective global campaigns, delivering up to 35% improvement in return on ad spend and 23% improvement in campaign efficiency."

As organizations increasingly rely on AI to guide marketing operations and execution, the quality of the underlying data is becoming a competitive advantage. Leading organizations will be defined not by the AI tools they adopt, but by the strength and reliability of the performance intelligence that powers them.

The Substrate is available now.

About Marketing Evolution

Marketing Evolution is the System of Record for Marketing Performance. Built on 25 years of measurement science, the Substrate gives enterprises a trusted, privacy-safe view of what's driving marketing performance, without relying on cookies or personal data, and continuously monitors that data to surface issues and opportunities in real time. Marketing Evolution is used by Fortune 500 brands and global agencies to measure, plan, and optimize marketing investment with confidence.

*Historical data requirements based on standard MMM practice; Algorithm-level validation against synthetic ground-truth data, at >=200 unit panel size.

SOURCE Marketing Evolution