Hendren is a chat based interface that allows marketers and agency partners to ask questions – much like ChatGPT – and receive real-time insights that can ‘supercharge analysis and optimisation’. Mutinex promises an antidote to ‘analysis paralysis’ to ‘empower marketers and agencies more time to do what they love’ – but will it replace human nuance and smarts? No, but it could crush consultancies.
Mutinex has released its most ambitious product to date that it believes will revolutionise how marketers and agency partners use market mix modelling (MMM) – pioneering a new category of analysis in the process.
Called ‘Hendren’, the new tool works in a similar vein to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. Users type in a prompt and the machine scours Mutinex and client data sources to transform MMM insights and analytics into easily digestible summaries, bullet points and recommendations.
Usually, analysts will take MMM data points, charts and information, spend time analysing it and reporting on what it actually means for stakeholders.
Hendren – named after the Norse god of knowledge (who conveniently happens to share a name not too dissimilar to Mutinex co-founder Henry Innis) takes the grunt work out turning numbers and charts into a cohesive narrative within minutes.
“Hendren will help marketers reclaim their valuable time and redirect it to what really matters and that’s great creative ideas and realising the true power of marketing,” Innis said, telling B&T: “I would love to see a world where our human capital goes towards thinking about a creative idea and how that idea will change the rollout of a plan, looking at what the analytics are not telling us from the data. Humans are such a force multiplier and that’s so important.
“It might require changing workflows, but those new workflows will focus on thinking at the fringes rather than the centre, getting really excited about finding new opportunities, rather than having to maintain the reporting machine.
“I want human capital to be freed up, finding more growth, not less.”
Baxter: ‘My biggest creative championing role’
Hendren promises to reduce the burden on marketers and their agency partners in processing reams of market mix insights and analytics.
Mutinex APAC CEO Mat Baxter told B&T that Hendren will essentially “leapfrog” the MMM process and is the dawn of a new category called “BAM” or Business Answers Modelling.
“Business answers modelling is much more superior to market mix modelling, because MMM requires you still to do the work, the analysis, the effort and go through that whole process. This is responding directly to questions. Hendren is an analyst in your pocket, “ he said.
“It frees up marketers and agencies to get onto the shit that matters. The true value of a marketer is spending time on creativity, their brand, pricing strategy, partnerships and all that heavy lifting, high touch effort, but right now they don’t get the time they need or deserve.”
To put this into context, Baxter, who has led global media agencies including Initiative, says that it can reduce a 10 hour task of number crunching and analytics to a few minutes, freeing up time that is spent “feeding the machine” and “justifying marketing budgets”.
“We want to leapfrog those steps between data insight and answer, and get a straight answer,” he added.
“This is the biggest creative championing role I’ve ever had my entire career, including Naked, because you know what champions creativity? Proving marketing works, that’s what we do. We are giving marketers and agencies their time back to get on with creativity.”
He said that Hendren is a disrupter to the consulting industry – the likes of McKinsey, Boston and Bain: “Where you pay many millions of dollars to do what Hendren does for a fraction of the price with the exact same datasets and complete clarity, objectivity and analysis. It has a degree of finesse and polish that you need for a boardroom or CFO.”
That said, media agencies – who also do some of this work – are not completely off the hook.
“What I would encourage agencies to think about is that there is so much power now in the marketplace in AI and technology that could alleviate a lot of the grunt work in processing and reporting,” Baxter said.
“Analytics has now been disintermediated and Hendren is an analyst in your pocket.”
Baxter, who was brought into Mutinex by co-founders Innis and Farrugia to sell the product to the APAC market, is obviously upbeat about Hendren’s potential but Mutinex has been on a sharp growth trajectory.
The business, which has 75 staff, now has a market capitalisation well north of $125 million and a footprint across Asia-Pacific and the US, where it serves several blue chip clients and is one of the fastest growing SAAS company in that market.
This year it has hired the likes of Baxter – who told this year’s Cannes in Cairns conference that upfront media deals need to be torpedoed –and former Dentsu Media and IPG Mediabrands chief Danny Bass to the fold.
‘A CMOs friend’
Co-founder Matt Farrugia told B&T that Mutinex started looking at Hendren two years ago because they wanted to develop a tool that would make MMM more accessible to CMOs and senior marketers.
“The reason why we began this project is because we realised that CMOs are time poor, do they want to be accessing another analytics platform,” he told B&T.
“If they had a question or wanted to build a report they would go to their data analysts. So we wanted to remove the barrier for accessing another analytics platform and make it exist more naturally for how they work.
“The solution was simple: a chat application that considers how behaviours are evolving with the use of ChatGPT and the notion of prompts and asking questions.
“We built a solution using an LLM, got some senior marketers to engage with it and it really transformed how they viewed GrowthOS. All of a sudden it became a powerful companion that they could query and prompt when they need it.”
So what does Hendren mean for agencies?
Atomic 212 chief digital officer – and a Mutinex customer – believes it’s a force for good, but could change how agencies and clients operate.
“I believe all of our clients will have data driven marketing mix models. Within five years it will be table stakes. The chatbot/LLM become ubiquitous within five years and enable marketers to make data driven decisions much quicker,” he said.
“We will have to work out how we integrate it into our workflow but I can definitely see a future where all agencies and clients will have to become much more insights smart.
“This tool gives us a springboard and humans will need to up their game in taking it from the springboard into the real world, but it will never replace human understanding of media or the nuance of strategy and planning.”
Mutinex said Hendren has officially launched. Time will tell if it redefines MMM or kills consultants, but Dixon is clear on one positive aspect: I do believe they will be a global number one in marketing analytics and it’s great to see an Aussie company pioneering it.”
