Making Sense of Advertiser Growth: Henry Innis, CEO of Mutinex

Marketing should not be about tracking the current performance of an existing business. It should be about how to grow the business in the future.

Henry Innis, CEO and Co-Founder of Mutinex

C-Suite Blues will, from time to time, interview C-Suite Executives who are committed to solving Madison Avenue’s dysfunctions -- through in-depth industry diagnoses, innovative strategic thinking, creative design of technology and a commitment to overcome Madison Avenue’s chronic resistance to change.

Henry Innis, CEO and co-founder (with Matt Farrugia) of Mutinex, a company whose innovative Media Mix Model (MMM), is one such executive.

Here is Henry Innis’ recent interview by Michael Farmer, condensed and edited for clarity.

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Most CMOs genuinely want to drive growth, but they have a credibility problem with their CEOs and CFOs, who see the large marketing spends but are underwhelmed by the delivered results. This leads to a belief that marketing spend is a cost rather than an investment.

CMOs, under chronic pressure to justify their spending, are tempted to use MMM to justify their current and past media mix spend levels. This turns MMM into a reporting tool rather than a knowledge tool. CMOs report what they have done and what it has achieved, using limited data sets, rather than finding a way to use MMM to give new insights about the future.

This locks CMOs into justifying the underperforming past rather than creating a new and viable future.

CMOs are not helped by their current MMM tools, which have been internally customized to give comfortable answers rather than objective truths. CMOs are not helped by their complicated matrix organizations, which gives voice to too many other marketing executives who have a stake in justifying the past.

The justification of the past locks marketing organizations into repeating the mistakes of the past. That is why we see too many major advertisers failing to grow; they have not really taken the steps to question their media strategies and adopt breakthrough strategies that take their companies in new directions.

MMMs should provide objective truths about mix and spend. Objective truths can then drive marketing spend strategies.

Technology has been a harsh taskmaster for many CMOs. Technology seems too complicated for them; they delegate technological tools to their tech-savvy analysts. We think that this is wrong. Technology should empower senior executives to ask smart questions and get immediate, smart answers.

At Mutinex, we have been mindful of this by ensuring that our “front-end” is extremely user friendly, even for those who feel otherwise helpless in the face of technology. We have built AI into our front-end, so that senior marketing executives can query Mutinex to answer the questions that are most on their mind. It is not enough to simply offer a transparent model. You need an interface that every marketer can easily use without hours of tedious training.

A great parallel we drew inspiration from is Bloomberg. When Bloomberg launched, they completely transformed the bond market by making it transparent and accessible. Our goal is to do the same for growth. If we can build a “Bloomberg terminal for growth,” where every person responsible for growth has clear, transparent answers for their questions, backed by data, we believe that the marketing industry will be in a much better place.

Launching a new product like Mutinex is not easy, even if its benefits are clear. We’re up against Google and Meta, who position themselves as execution and measurement providers. They have inherent conflicts of interest. They grade their own homework; their measures are self-serving and non-transparent. But they are so big, and so omnipresent, that they influence the thinking of marketing executives.

Mutinex gives different answers about what the optimal spends should be, often in conflict with what Google and Meta have to say about how clients should spend their marketing budgets.

Another complication comes from potential customers who have been conditioned to think of MMM as models that present something rather than provide insights. This mindset needs to be changed.

Implementing a new platform like Mutinex requires a shift in work practices – moving towards a more frequent, agile cadence with an always-on test-and-learn mindset. Change management is key, here. Marketing organizations need ongoing performance reporting, support for budget setting, insights for strategy and planning, and continuous testing and tactical optimizations. MMM needs to be part of the marketing organizations’ ongoing processes, not a tool that gets dragged out infrequently to explain that current spend patterns are ”just fine.”

Within the large holding companies, legacy systems, entrenched processes and internal politics slow-down innovation. The same is true within large marketing organizations. Breakthroughs require genuine innovation, and the barriers to innovation need to be eliminated.

This, of course, requires strong leadership from the most senior executives, whether at media agencies or within marketing organizations.

We enable brands to reallocate media budgets rather than cut media budgets, although if cuts need to be made – usually dictated by CFOs – we can help marketers decide how to do this with the least pain for brand performance.

Our platform is not just another marketing model. It’s a growth co-pilot, appropriate for marketers who want their growth rates to soar.

We are focused on helping businesses make sense of the vast amount of data that they are navigating, drawing out clear inferences about what is working and what is not – presenting this in a way that drives answers and action.

Marketing is not really a complicated discipline. Marketing should provide simple answers to eight simple questions.

1.     Is the creative working?

2.     How does price impact growth?

3.     How does distribution impact growth?

4.     How does product impact growth?

5.     What’s the minimum and maximum I can invest in this market and in this channel?

6.     Which tactics in a channel maximize ROI in the short and the long-term?

7.     What combination of budget tactics drive the best return?

8.     How is the wider market impacting my marketing and growth performance?

We built a model that provides answers to these questions, and we are optimistic that it can help to transform marketing thinking and the growth results that our clients seek.

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Note to my readers: as of November 1, 2024, C-Suite Blues will be converting to a paid-subscription basis — I plan to invest more time to investigate and write about the dramatic changes that will be needed to bring the industry back to the levels of performance it deserves and achieved in the recent past.

As always, I plan on writing the truth, painful as it might be for today’s industry leaders.