The former global chief of Interpublic Group’s Huge and Initiative will help champion Mutinex’s growth while co-founders Henry Innis and Matt Farrugia spend more time on the tools. Baxter (pictured above) tells B&T why he wanted to join Mutinex, how the marketing analytics platform is going to shake up the industry and those that do not get on board could soon be out of work.
Two of the industry’s sharpest thinkers and provocateurs recently met up for dinner at North Bondi Fish to thrash over how they view the future of the media and marketing industry.
Mat Baxter, the Naked Communications alumni who went on to lead one of the largest media agency networks in the world, agreed to meet up with martech trailblazer and Mutinex co-founder and global CEO Henry Innis over seafood, months after leaving his US based role as the global CEO of IPG’s digital creative and design agency Huge.
Baxter previously warned that his next move was going to be disruptive, and found in Mutinex’s Innis and Farrugia visionaries who had similar ideas.
“There’s no doubt Mat and I are both strong personalities,” Innis said in one of the industry’s understatements of the year. “I found what Mat had said at the Future of TV panel about shifting marketing budgets and the evolving fundamental structure of the industry incredibly insightful, and it made me think ‘that’s just the sort of person I want to work with’.”
Two firebrands might work a treat on an industry conference stage, but could this punchy duo translate to an effective relationship in the boardroom?
“We had dinner and spoke candidly about our own weaknesses or vulnerabilities, and what could work and what couldn’t work,” Innis said.
“I have always found that when you build good relationships with vulnerability and through trust, rather than through bravado, you tend to get much richer and better relationships. I found that Mat and I could do that over that dinner and in a really constructive and deeply personal way. That went a long way to providing a lot of confidence we could work together.”
It’s a bit like Zuck & Sandberg
Officially Baxter’s job title is to lead Mutinex across the Asia-Pacific region in its next phase of growth, but in reality he is likely to take a global lens to how Mutinex goes to market.
It allows Innis “the product guy” and chief customer officer Farrugia, who was previously MD of Y&R, more freedom to focus on refining and developing Mutinex’s apps as well as some of the day to day operations.
Since launching in 2018, Mutinex has become one of the darlings of the Australian martech industry.
The business, which has 65 staff, now has a market capitalisation of $125 million and a footprint across Asia-Pacific and the US, where it serves “five large enterprises”, has eight staff. Its GrowthOS marketing mix modelling platform, which allows marketers to understand how their investments are working in real time, is one of the fastest growing software as a service platforms in-market, and Innis is spending more time on the other side of the Pacific to capitalise on the demand.
Innis described Baxter’s appointment as similar to one of Silicon Valley’s most famous business power couples who not so long ago split up.
“An important part of building a great, well-scaled organisation is learning to let go and to trust, and build better leadership structures around you to grow your business in the future. Mark Zuckerberg had to do that, to a degree, with Sheryl Sandberg.
“Every great startup, at some stage, has to become a scale up, and you have to build a lot more trust with your leaders.”
Innis accepts it will not be easy letting go of the wheel, and may still grapple with the “perpetual fear of death” and insecurity that entrepreneurs sometimes go through, but is confident in Baxter’s “superpower” to develop teams that rally around products, know how to sell them, and onboard them into clients’ workflows and business processes.
Baxter told B&T he is well up for the challenge, and has invested his own money into the business. He reckons he has a distinct advantage in taming his new leadership colleagues.
“My other superpower is that I’m the Henry and Matt whisperer,” he said. “Let’s be frank – we have two very ambitious, headstrong co-founders. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I know how emotional and passionate these situations can be.
“My job is to channel Matt and Henry in a way that makes us as much money as possible, and builds the best culture possible.”
‘They don’t have a clue’
Those who have followed Baxter’s career might question whether ‘whispering’ is his strong suit, and this interview with B&T certainly didn’t change that perception. But Baxter left this publication in no doubt why he signed up for the gig and why the Mutinex proposition can be a disruptive force for good.
“The number one thing that marketers need to know is what works and what doesn’t work. As amazing as this sounds, 99.9% of marketers don’t have a fucking clue, and if they have no idea what their budgets are doing, they deserve to be fired,” he said, pulling few punches.
“If you ask the average marketer whether their $30 million investment in media works, they will tell you things like, weI got 1.4 billion views on TikTok’. But who gives a shit – how many products did you sell?
“What Mutinex does is bring accountability, transparency and visibility to marketers and their agency partners in a way that hasn’t been done before. We’re a decision, driving and enabling business, and we allow CMOs to make decisions that help them grow. And that’s why I’m excited about this role.”
It’s not just marketers that are being let down by the wider data, analytics and modelling ecosystem. Baxter argues that the reactive nature of agencies using static marketing mix modelling products, spending months gathering, analysing and presenting data before the insights could even be used, often rendered the process ineffective.
“By the time the client digested it and then actually made sense of what they were asked to do off the back of this, it is already another six months,” he said. “When Henry demonstrated Mutinex GrowthOS, it was the most dynamic and real time system I’ve seen in my 20-plus years working at agencies.”
‘It’s make or break’
Baxter stressed that Mutinex GrowthOS is designed to enhance the work of marketers and media agencies, rather than compete with the latter, and that it can be a “circuit breaker” to reset the industry of unhealthy ingrained behaviours – the “muscle memory” – of how media money is being invested, such as upfront investments in media.
“Every year, all the holding groups do upfronts with all of the TV networks where they commit large amounts of their clients’ money. For example, they might say, ‘We’re going to give a TV channel $150 million’,” he explained. “But have they got a single client brief yet? No, they don’t even know what their client challenges are for the year, but they’re already deciding where dollars go.
“As a CMO, your single most important responsibility is being in charge of a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. If you don’t even know what works or what the problem is, and then you’re going to do a deal with a media owner, you shouldn’t be in your job.
“This is the stuff that makes or breaks the industry and where we can be trailblazers and disrupt things. Choose the channels that work and commit the money to where the investment is most effective….let’s break this muscle memory embedded in our business.”
Innis said that what sets Mutinex apart from its competitive set is that it measures outcomes rather than inputs, and that this is essential for the industry to not only survive, but thrive.
“When the measurement ecosystem was about inputs, not outcomes, of course, the effectiveness of an industry will deteriorate over time,” he said. “It’s our duty to move the industry away from inputs-based measurement to outcomes-based measurement. If we’re an outcomes-based measurement industry, we’re going to be respected by the board and the CFO. And an industry that, most importantly, is growing headcount and getting the attention of the wider business community.”
Baxter talks a good talk, and uses the sort of language that should pique the interests of marketing chiefs under fire from CFOs to show more return on their investments. Only time will tell whether the Baxter and Innis show is a romcom or offers the thrills and spills of a corporate drama. Either way, it promises to be a global blockbuster.
APAC chief Baxter and global CEO Innis begin their new roles at Mutinex tomorrow.
