What you need to know:

• Ex-Dentsu and IPG Mediabrands chief Danny Bass has joined Mutinex as its first chief revenue officer.
• Bass’ appointment follows the arrival of one-time IPG colleague Mat Baxter in May as APAC boss.
• Bass said the firm is pushing at an open door with pressure piling onto marketers daily to prove their worth and that their investments are driving hard growth.
• He's aiming to displace big four consulting firms in the boardroom while making Mutinex the IBM of MMM – in the sense that it is known and trusted by all risk-averse buyers as well as those chomping at the bit for tech innovation.
• But Mutinex is also aiming to go beyond MMM. Baxter claims announcements later this week will make market mix modelling look like a flip phone and put Mutinex "in a category of one".
• Innis reckons there is an opportunity to 10x marketing investment – and is going hard at it.

Quietly confident

Former Dentsu Media and IPG Mediabrands chief Danny Bass has officially joined Mutinex as its first chief revenue officer.

He’s aiming to displace big four consulting firms by giving top level management growth tools based on hard sales data, while also becoming the top econometrics brand in order to convince all corners of the B2B buying group – crucially the risk-averse 'hidden buyers' that tech firms often overlook, losing out to established rivals as result.

“Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM,” per Bass. “I think there is a big opportunity for us to be that sense of security – both for a CMO, we will give them that firepower to go back into the executive room to ask for more money and secure the marketing budget – but also for the c-suite, with the level of confidence that we bring.”

Bass’ appointment brings another industry heavyweight into Mutinex’s leadership team. Former IPG-owned Huge global boss, Mat Baxter, invested his own cash and joined the $120m Australian marketing analytics startup in May as APAC CEO. Bass will sit alongside Mutinex Vice President US and Multinational, John Sintras, and Global CEO and Co-Founder, Henry Innis, with a global and functional remit overseeing revenue generation.

It’s quite a crew – and Bass admits “it’s been a while since I was the quiet one in the room”. How that dynamic plays out for the start-up scaling its APAC business while bidding to crack the US market and displace larger competitors will become apparent, but Baxter and Innis are confident they have an operator who brings a different style of approach.

Bass was a casualty of the redundancies to hit Dentsu in April – but had already signed up the holdco’s media operation to Mutinex as a reseller – and he’s going in with his eyes open, having likewise worked with Baxter at IPG.

“Danny is the calming statesman. He reassures people,” said Baxter, suggesting the same descriptor is less applicable to Innis and himself. “We need a Danny in the business.”

Bass thinks the firm is pushing at an open door.

“I have seen very clearly the continued pressure marketers have been put under. That is just increasing seemingly weekly, if not daily. The role of marketing within a business and the scrutiny the marketing budget continues to have is real. More and more, that budget is being looked at by the CFO, the CEO and so on,” per Bass.

“What became incredibly obvious to me was the product that has been developed here, and the products being developed and due to launch, along with Mat’s global take on where things are heading, made it a very clear choice for me that this is the right place for me to be.”

Beyond MMM

Now the trio are aiming to go beyond market mix modelling – and open up a new category, while flipping a market narrative of cuts and cost out to one of marketing-driven growth. They’re planning a big reveal at the first Mutinex Marketing & Money summit later this week in Sydney. Baxter is typically low key.

“This isn't about going up against the competitors in our category of MMM. This is about saying fuck that category – in the most respectful way possible – that’s yesterday's news. This is about saying there's now a new category of one, and Mutinex is the only player in it,” he suggested.

“On Thursday, MMM is going to look like a flip phone and we're announcing a smartphone … We're talking about a leapfrog moment on Thursday that’s really going to change all of the rules.”

10x growth

Innis likens the mooted quantum leap to the arrival of the Bloomberg terminal and its disruptive effect on what had been a poorly measured bonds market in the 1980s.

“The bond market is now 10, 20 times what the equities market is. Everybody who says measurement is purely about cuts is wrong. Every single piece of evidence says that if you can measure what works and prove what works, you can actually start to build entire industries, where money flows in, where people invest positively because they're confident about the payback. And ultimately, people want to be there because they can celebrate shared success,” said Innis.

“The single biggest lack of unifying thread that currently exists across the marketing landscape is a shared language of success. Because we don't have a shared language of success, we don't have a shared way to mobilise our industry towards greater success. The mission of this business is to create the shared language of success for marketing. If we're able to deliver the shared language of success for marketing, we are going to create an industry that’s 10 times the size of the current industry we’re in.”

Prove it

Baxter has seen how difficult it is for marketers to make their case to the board and executive leadership team, to the detriment of the wider marketing and advertising industry.

“The silver bullet literally for every challenge on the agency side that agency leaders, holding company CEOs, Wall Street analysts lament, is solved by outcomes-based understanding of marketing. Think about this: How does an agency justify getting a fee increase, not a fee reduction with procurement? It proves it adds value,” he continues.

“How does a marketer get back at the seat of the table with their executive team and taken seriously, and in fact grow their influence at the ELT in their business? It's through understanding outcomes. How does the marketer grow their budget, not have it reduced quarter over quarter, and demonstrate marketing as a growth driver, not an expense in the business? Every core foundational problem in marketing and advertising is fundamentally driven by its inability to demonstrate that it drives the direct outcome to top and bottom-line performance.

“There's only one dialogue companies understand and that's money. Marketers have not spoken that language for a very long time – you could argue probably ever, right? We allow marketers to speak in that language. Like Babel the translation app: We're the Babel for marketers. We'll Babel you into a finance literacy and fluency you don't have,” he suggested.

“That's a really exciting proposition for a marketer, but more importantly for our industry.  If we want to get taken seriously, we have to stop going into boardrooms and stop presenting 60-second montages that show this is the work marketers do. They don't care. The work that they want to see marketers do is how much are you growing my business?”

Bass said flipping the narrative is sorely needed amid a slew of negative news, cuts and restructures in the local market.

“I think we are one of a very few who are actually talking stuff up, who are looking really positive, who are seeing the change in the market is a really good thing,” he said. “There's something unique in being an organisation that is genuinely about growth where many others unfortunately are just not in that space anymore.”

More incoming

For Innis, it’s now a case of matching engineering and product development investment with sophistication in go-to-market strategy and customer engagement. Hence beefing up the top team – and hinting that more hires are incoming.

“You go through a stage where you develop R&D. We’re post that series A phase, where we need to get robust at our go-to-market and how we build scalability for our customers, how we build scalability, revenue repeatability,” per Innis.

“You need people who've got deep experience with customers on the go-to-market scaling side of the business and who can help shape that product roadmap. On the flip side, you need to have very deep investment in technology. Mutinex’s headcount is still dominated by engineering and data science, but we'll see that kind of rebalance in the near future.”