Case Studies
Rippling x Paramark
How Rippling broke past its demand-capture ceiling, powered by incrementality, MMM & MTA instead of last-touch attribution.
Pranav Piyush
Co-founder, CEO
How Rippling broke past its demand-capture ceiling, powered by incrementality, MMM & MTA instead of last-touch attribution
Rippling had built a strong growth engine, but it was too focused on demand capture. The funnel was bottom-heavy, spend ran on last-touch attribution, and brand investment sat in a separate budget with no measurement attached. The model worked, until it hit a ceiling.
To grow past it, Rippling had to generate its own demand and prove that upper-funnel spend paid off. Over the past year, working with Paramark, the team built the measurement confidence to treat all of its media as one budget, and to make bigger bets than it had before.
“There is no one that could convince me that looking at last-touch will allow you to have long-term sustainable growth. If you want to think long term and strive for N of 1 outcomes, you are going to need a different way to measure the success of your marketing.”
- Neel Murthy, CMO, Rippling
Who is Rippling?
Rippling is the AI platform that manages HR, IT, and Finance, giving Rippling AI the data and permissions it needs to help run your company. Because everything lives in one place, Rippling AI has a complete view of your business and can take trusted action quickly and safely.
Founded in 2016 in San Francisco by Parker Conrad and Prasanna Sankar, Rippling serves businesses worldwide, with offices across the US, Ireland, the UK, India, and Australia. Rippling has raised $1.8B from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Bedrock, among others, and has been named to the CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Cloud 100, and G2’s Top Global Software Companies list.
The problem: seeing past last-touch attribution
Neel Murthy joined Rippling in 2025 as VP of Growth, and has since been promoted to CMO. His mandate: deploy the company’s global marketing opex for the most return, and ultimately the most ARR. He inherited a growth engine built for demand capture and a last-touch model that credited leads by clicks. Brand spend sat in its own budget, but was much too small because of attribution issues. At the time, Rippling had no CMO. Growth and brand were two separate functions, each reporting into the CRO, which meant there was no single owner stitching the two halves of marketing together. In practice, the measurement framework would have to be the thing that connected them.
The change he wanted was as much conceptual as technical: stop treating brand and performance as separate worlds, view them as one pool of media, and attribute downstream value to all of it over time.
Why Rippling didn’t build it in-house
Rippling builds software for a living, so building measurement in-house was an obvious question, and one Neel raised more than once, even after signing. Two things settled it. Building and running a measurement company is a heavy lift. And a provider that learns across many companies sees things you never will from your own data alone.
“There are some benefits of things that we are not doing that come into a more shared world view like the one Paramark has.”
- Neel Murthy
Factor in the opportunity cost to Rippling’s data science team, and the choice was easy. Every time Neel revisited it, the answer came back the same: the team was happy with Paramark.
Why Rippling chose Paramark
The relationship began the way the best demand does, without a sales pitch. Neel and Pranav (Paramark CEO) had known each other for over a decade but hadn’t spoken in a while. Pranav’s take on measurement kept showing up in his feed. By the time incrementality came up in his interviews, Paramark was already on his shortlist. His counterpart on the brand side, Ryan Narod, VP of Brand Marketing, had also reached out on his own, and the conversation took off from there.
There was also an objection to clear. Many in B2B believe there isn’t enough signal for incrementality and MMM to work. Neel didn't buy it, and that conviction was part of why he pushed for Paramark internally.
“A lot of folks thought there wasn’t enough signal in B2B. Especially at Rippling’s size, there is enough signal. You just have to figure out how to triangulate and get the right partner on your side.”
- Neel Murthy
The solution: two frameworks, triangulated
Rippling started small: one multi-channel test, one metric. Over the year it grew to cover more metrics across the buyer journey, more products, and more geographies as the company expanded internationally.
The method is triangulation between two Paramark reads: an always-on MMM that shows how channels translate to business outcomes over time, and geo and matched-market incrementality tests that measure lift precisely but can only cover a few channels at once. Neither is a single source of truth. The confidence comes from putting them together.
“The tests are finite, and the MMM is directional. Putting those two together is where we get the most confidence.”
- Neel Murthy
From skeptics to consensus
Rippling’s teams are technical and skeptical by design. They probe every data point and take nothing at face value, which is why building confidence took a year, not a quarter. The model got better with every experiment. As the reads kept tracking to the metric that matters most, ARR growth, consensus formed, and bringing finance along got easier.
It also changed how the team experiments. Instead of fencing off a separate experimental budget, Rippling could tie every creative and media test back to business outcomes. That gave the team more room to experiment, not less.
“When you think about marketing holistically, that is when you actually have the freedom to experiment creatively. Without that framework, you are disconnecting parts of marketing that shouldn’t be disconnected.”
- Neel Murthy
Since the first engagement, Rippling has expanded its use of Paramark, adding more models across more metrics, products, and geographies. Within the first year, the relationship had tripled in size, and continues to grow.
The payoff: a Super Bowl-sized bet, made with confidence
The clearest proof came earlier this year. Rippling made a bet it says it couldn’t have made without this foundation: a regional Super Bowl campaign, paired with an evergreen creative run that carried from February through the end of May, well past the game itself. The MMM showed how the surrounding channel mix was performing. A geo test measured lift in the markets where the ads actually ran.
Most brands build up to a Super Bowl over years. Rippling could start there because it already knew how the rest of its media was performing. The two measurement frameworks are what made a hard bet possible.
“Most people don’t start with a Super Bowl for their TV buy. It is usually in reverse. It was confidence in our measurement frameworks and understanding our marketing funnel that allowed us to make this bet in the first place.”
- Neel Murthy
The human layer: growth advisory
For a team where most people were new to incrementality and MMM, working with Paramark’s growth advisors, including Cole Grigsby, carried weight. Having someone to explain concepts and translate results meant Neel wasn’t the only person who could interpret the data, and the program kept moving as new models spun up.
“Having growth advisory to actually explain things, so I don’t have to, was a really good ROI for us.”
- Neel Murthy
Neel expects the advisory relationship to change over time. As his team builds reps and Paramark’s tooling gets more self-serve, he sees the advisory shifting toward tactical guidance on experimentation rather than interpreting the data. That path, from hands-on support to self-sufficiency, is the goal on both sides.
What’s next
Rippling is among the first customers in the beta for Paramark Live, a near-real-time read between MMM refreshes that shows how recent spend is estimated to be moving pipeline, with an incrementality read across all their models since the last refresh. As Rippling grows internationally, the plan is to run the same measurement system across more business units and geographies, so success is judged through one lens instead of a patchwork of models.
“I'm definitely MMM-pilled. The reason we all love growth and marketing is because there is nuance. If it was black and white, our jobs would be easy. That is why you use different modalities of measurement: there is no true single source of truth. A good marketer can use metrics; a great marketer can triangulate the truth between multiple metrics.”
- Neel Murthy
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