What you need to know: 

• High profile marketing and tech investors have participated in an early stage funding round for Mutiny's automated econometrics platform, WarChest.
• Faster and more predictive market mix modelling is challenging big consulting firms and even media agency econometric offers.
• WarChest recently topped $1bn in media spend among its customers.
• iSelect and Shaver Shop chairman and private equity identity, Brodie Arnhold, who joined the current investment round, said there was “huge demand and focus” from boards for marketing to be treated as an investment. “In order to do that the tooling and the data marketers and CEOs need to access will be different," he said.    

Media mix moneymen

The Australian cloud-based challenger to conventional econometrics and market and media mix modelling, Mutiny, has landed a high-profile line-up of investors to fuel the next round of its product development and international expansion with a capital raising which values the firm at $12.5m. 

Mutiny and its marketing investment analytics platform WarChest, has blue chip brands including Samsung, Asahi, ING and MeBank on its books to determine which media channels are driving greater marketing returns. The combined media spend of current WarChest users recently hit $1bn, the firm’s founders said. 

Mutiny claims it is up-ending conventional econometrics and market mix modelling (MMM) from agency networks and large consulting firms by collapsing lead times on ROI analysis from more than three months to near real-time reporting. 

Investors are buying the narrative.

The new round of backers follow former Clemenger CEO, now Deloitte Digital partner Nick Garrett and former Publicis CEO Andrew Baxter who invested last year in the business. About 20 per cent of the company is now held by investors, the remainder with co-founders Henry Innis and Matt Farrugia, both former ad agency execs. 

Innis and Farrugia said the group had three priorities with the new investment round: decrease Mutiny’s reliance on enterprise sales and onboarding teams by building a self-service product; develop more tactical and detailed campaign capabilities for agencies and advertisers on media channel mix, pricing and distribution; and expand operations to the US with plans to land two or three blue chip contracts there in the next year. 

“We're going to move away from trying to provide predictions on whole budget allocation,” Innis told Mi3. “We'll still do that but also build the ability to query lots of different insights into a market mix model and then get very specific and targeted answers to questions specific to an advertiser and a category.” 

If there are floods in New South Wales, says Innis, WarChest will determine whether an advertiser should adjust marketing and distribution or whether it’s a revised pricing strategy that will maximise profitability or sales. If competitors drop their prices should that change a brand’s marketing strategy and how? Does the media channel mix change and to what? “We're not there yet, we've got the infrastructure there but this [capital] raise will enable us to build the front end application to start to allow marketers to use that in a self-service manner,” said Innis.

iSelect and Shaver Shop chairman and private equity identity, Brodie Arnhold, who joined the current investment round, said there was “huge demand and focus” from boards for marketing to be treated as an investment.

“In order to do that the tooling and the data marketers and CEOs need to access will be different. Mutiny unlocks tooling and data as an experience, and fundamentally helps to navigate these challenges with a scalable software solution. It’s something that will become ubiquitous in the future in my view, and that’s why I was excited to invest in the business. I can certainly see Shaver Shop, a business I chair with $10m-plus in marketing spend, being a future user of a platform like this.”