What is the Marketing Conditions Score (MCS)?

The Marketing Conditions Score (MCS) empowers businesses to optimize their advertising investments by providing a comprehensive, data-driven outlook on market dynamics.

MCS aggregates a diverse set of leading indicators—including macroeconomic measures (including GDP growth, inflation), consumer signals (including spending patterns, confidence levels) and market-health benchmarks (including small-business sentiment, discretionary-spending indices). Each component is weighted according to the specific characteristics of a company’s products or services to generate a tailored forecast of market performance. The resulting score offers a clear, at-a-glance assessment of a how much advertising investment a product’s requires to succeed under current economic conditions.

Leveraging this forecasting, MCS delivers actionable recommendations for quarterly or annual marketing budgets, ensuring that ad spend aligns with real-time consumer demand and sentiment. As a result, companies can optimize their advertising investment, avoiding overinvesting in periods of naturally strong demand and mitigating the risk of underinvestment when facing economic headwinds. This maximizes return on advertising dollars across all market environments.

Why Contingency Plans

A marketing campaign’s success is deeply influenced by the prevailing macroeconomic environment. As such, we tailor ad budgets and creative approaches (see Oravant Creative Quadrants) to the forecast annual macroeconomic regime. Doing so allows for better results, as strategy is tailored to consumer sentiment and purchasing power, as impacted by the economy.

Since no one can predict the future with certainty, our model incorporates the probability of each macro regime, as defined by MSCI, and generates tailored contingency plans for the most likely scenarios. By doing so, we enable our clients to have a backup plan ready for the most likely outcomes, as well as low-probability Black Swan events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic was.

By establishing these contingency plans in advance, our clients avoid disruptive, last-minute budget reallocations and reactive campaign overhauls. This allows for strategic consistency to be maintained, safeguarding momentum toward long-term objectives, even if unexpected events take place.

Generating a Tailored Risk Range

By leveraging Bayesian inference, we create a budget range to account for the most probable macroeconomic outcomes. This approach allows for our clients to select a final spend level within that range that aligns with their goals and risk-appetite.

By incorporating a range, our framework avoids rigidity in budgeting and allows for a collaborative approach between Oravant and our client companies.

Why use Bayesian Inference?

Bayesian inference starts with an initial input for the marketing budget based on MCS. When new economic data arrives, such as GDP forecasts, inflation rates, or consumer confidence scores, it measures how well each possible budget fits those observations. By combining the original guess and this fresh data, it builds a probability curve over all plausible budget levels.

Rather than picking one single number, the method then takes a lower and upper bound from that curve (for example, the budgets that together cover 80% of the probability). That creates a clear spending range, showing where the ideal budget is most likely to fall.

Each time new information comes in, the process repeats: the previous result becomes the new starting point, so the range adjusts and usually narrows over time. This makes the budget plan both flexible and increasingly reliable as economic conditions evolve.