One of the most striking conversations I’ve had in recent times was around the limitations of market mix modelling. Insights from MMMs, or as we now call them, growth brains, sat just within the data that they had seen. Marketers knew many of these insights made sense, but they lacked the external spark and context that would make them meaningful.
For a long time, the source of most external inspiration for myself has been two sources. From an academic sense, it has been the Ehrenger-Bass Institute led by Byron Sharp and Rachel Kennedy. They are the single best source of academic truth within the marketing industry (and far too many modellers ignore the Institute in my view, and the truth of generalised vs. spurious correlations).
The second source of external inspiration has been the collections of LIONS properties replete with case studies. WARC, LIONS and the Effies remain the central aggregators of many pieces of the world’s most interesting work, and WARC remains a hub for many of the world’s best advertising people to discuss how the work works.
WARC in particular has been a long-time reader of mine.
I met Amin Mrini and Paul Coxhill during our last capital raise via my friends at Tracksuit and James Hurmann. They were extraordinarily decent people, indeed, there was a time then when we considered whether Ascential at the time may be a strategic Mutinex investor. We couldn’t make it work at the time, but Paul, Amin and the wider Ascential team struck up a friendship that lasted.
Mutinex has been through many iterations. We first began life in COVID as a consultancy, and really, the first two years of the business until ‘22 were on life support. I cannot tell you how mentally difficult it was to start a new business during COVID, after sacrificing a corporate career to do so. The odds were long and the days were longer. The whole point of the consultancy was to get enough money to build a platform (we didn’t know what venture capital was in those days).
When we first got life in ‘22 as a SaaS business, we set out with our singular vision to get every marketer the information they needed to make good decisions.
But today, we know things are harder than that. Marketers are being confronted with the demand for answers in increasingly turbulent and tricky times more than ever. Concerningly, most marketers are now mandated to provide certainty in an environment where there is anything but.
At the end of ‘24, we launched our Growth Answers, On Demand proposition. It’s safe to say that this year has been the biggest growth year of my career at Mutinex, where we’ve grown faster than I would have possibly thought. Our mission of helping every marketer answer growth questions is resonating I think because we’re saving marketers from the deep agony of wading through dashboards and getting them to reliable answers faster. But it’s not enough to just read data brilliantly and have intelligent responses.
In our product team, we’ve thought deeply about what constitutes a good answer. We think it comes down to three core components:
- Is the answer accurate?
- Is the answer timely?
- Is the answer specific?
Broadly, you can see our product roadmap at Marketers & Money moving to support this vision. Underneath this, we looked around the market to understand how the foundational models were accessing better answers. One clear element was they worked to gain access to content to provide better access to answers (you can see how important this is in the Perplexity vs. Reddit case, for example).
To us, WARC is the pinnacle of this point.
Today, we’re integrating WARC directly into MAITE in a partnership to turbo-charge every marketer’s answers with WARC content.
By cutting this exclusive partnership, we hope to turbo-charge scale in bringing together the worlds of internal growth models and external information and inspiration. Every marketer can now generate answers not just on their MMM, but on an entire world of marketing effectiveness that previously would have taken weeks and months to compile together.
That means marketers can answer questions like “What would my ROI be if I followed media best practices?” and “What are some case studies that support an optimised media scenario?” It brings together the world of insight that WARC delivers, and pairs it straight into the marketer’s financial numbers and world.
This is a first, serious step towards marketing superintelligence that goes way beyond simply agentics. And we’re incredibly excited to make this happen at scale globally.
If you are an effectiveness-led marketer who wants to finally unify your market mix efforts and ROI with a world of genuine marketing effectiveness, it’s time to get in touch. I’d love to give you a personal demo.
