Case Study
How Optus Supercharged Its Marketing Intelligence with Hendren Generative AI
Summary
For Cam Luby, Head of Consumer Marketing at Optus, traditional marketing mix modeling was reaching its limitations. The team needed a more agile, intelligent approach to understanding marketing performance.
When Optus implemented Mutinex’s Hendren, a secure LLM (Large Language Model) trained on their specific market mix data, everything changed.
Through Hendren, Optus has been able to rapidly analyze marketing outcomes including
- Channel performance
- Overall marketing performance
- Forecasting
- Diagnostic capabilities
“I really love looking at the GrowthOS platform,” Explains a Cam Luby, Head of Consumer Marketing at Australian telco, Optus, “but when you’re looking at a chart first you need to do the analysis – what is this telling me? And then you have to formulate a hypothesis – what should I do about it? With Hendren you just go straight to your question and it provides the hypothesis or a set of them for you. Now that’s not the end point obviously. You’d still need to perhaps interrogate the data a bit more and talk to your team. But it’s a very quick way to a starting point compared to how we’ve worked before.”
Luby highlighted a particularly powerful use case of the technology: “Sometimes you query performance and you can see that over a 12 week period, your marketing ROI has gone up. But I won’t be exactly clear on why that’s happened. So you ask Hendren why and that saves you a lot of analysis time in trying to figure out what could have caused the spike.”
“With Hendren you just go straight to your question and it provides the hypothesis or a set of them for you. Now that's not the end point obviously. You'd still need to perhaps interrogate the data a bit more and talk to your team. But it's a very quick way to a starting point compared to how we've worked before."”
From PowerPoint to Predictive Intelligence
Reflecting on the platform’s capabilities, Luby noted: “Where we are now with Mutinex is a lot more granular than when we used to see MMM in a presentation. We can look at not only holistic performance, but channel performance, campaigns and easily cut those things into different periods of time. So it’s a long way from a PowerPoint. But that’s a big step change in terms of the amount of information available. Tools like Hendren allow us to pinpoint the most important or valuable information so that we can move more quickly into decision mode.”
Mutinex’s Insights
Will Marks, Head of Marketing Science at Mutinex, provided additional context: “In the Marketing Science team we provide support to Mutinex customers to ensure that they’re getting the most from our platforms – from training on GrowthOS, to help with reporting and answering adhoc queries. The Marketing Science team can typically interpret the results from a model very quickly and provide some insights, within a couple of hours or a day. But we’re actually seeing fewer of those queries from customers since Hendren arrived. Because it’s obviously much quicker to just ask Hendren (who will provide you answers in minutes) than it is to wait for your marketing science partner to get back to you.”
A New Era of Marketing Intelligence
Optus’s experience demonstrates that the future of marketing analysis is conversational, instantaneous, and powered by AI. It’s not about replacing human intelligence, but dramatically augmenting it – providing quick, actionable insights that help businesses move faster and make more informed decisions.
The tool provides the initial hypothesis, context, and analysis, while human expertise continues to drive strategic thinking and nuanced decision-making.