Gain Theory’s global chief strategy officer Karen Kaufman and Aussie representative Justin Nel believe Australia is ripe for growth. They caught up with B&T to explain how Gain Theory differs from other MMMs and marketing effectiveness consultancies, and why marketers should avoid the temptation of multi-touch attribution [MTA].
The past two years have seen a huge rise in the hype around MMMs, most notably led by the rapidly growing Aussie business Mutinex.
Although the likes of Mutinex and newer players such as Prophet are attracting a lot of headlines in the trade press, there are established global players who have been providing marketing analytics and effectiveness solutions for decades.
One of these is WPP’s Gain Theory. The 200-strong division of the holdco, which was first established in 1973, operates in around 60 markets, with major hubs in New York, London and Singapore.
A year ago, Gain Theory hired Justin Nel, formerly with Circana, as its new business and client engagement director with a remit to help Australian brands grow. These include WPP clients Mars and Diageo, and – previously – DoorDash.
Gain Theory global chief strategy officer Karen Kaufman – a veteran of marketing analytics for more than 25 years – told B&T Gain Theory is eyeing Australia as a market for growth.
“Gain Theory is not new to Australia. I think people are oftentimes surprised to hear that we’ve been operating in Australia for many, many years, but we’ve been doing it through our global network,” she said.
“We believe there is a huge opportunity to amplify and accelerate Gain Theory’s growth in Australia, and so we are actively investing in the Australian market to bring our capabilities there. So putting boots on the ground with Justin, but also plans to hire other people as well, and looking at specific areas of opportunity in Australia, such as some of the more complex businesses that operate over here.”
Balancing humans & machines
Kaufman is aware of the Aussie MMM landscape, and some of the local SaaS players that dominate the MMM and analytics market.
She said that Gain Theory’s approach is different and has the backing of WPP’s more than 100,000-strong global workforce and investment into AI technology and other brand analytics tools, such as BAV, to lean into.
“At first glance, the capability of a Mutinex and Gain Theory seems similar, particularly to people who want measurement and optimisation, but when it comes down to how that’s executed, our capabilities and our focus area is quite different,” she said.
“In the space of marketing effectiveness, there’s a continuum, and on one side you have pure SaaS players that believe there can be a complete automation of data management, analytics and insights for the sake of speed and scale. While on the other side, you have pure play consultancies, like a Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey, that are saying ‘It’s really about people and expertise, that sort of the power of analytics comes through’.
“From a Gain Theory perspective, we are positioning ourselves exactly in the middle of that intersection. We believe it’s not one or the other, but it’s important to have the fusion of human and artificial intelligence… it’s about balancing the use of technology and using AI and machine learning to get to answers quickly, but having it driven by the expertise that we’ve built up over many, many years.”
Kaufman said that providing greater consultancy around the data and numbers has helped Gain Theory win clients in this market.
Gain Theory has several products that it offers, including Sensor, which she describes as “MMM on steroids”, providing granular insights within a week. Gain Theory is also investing in AI technology to provide foresights, allowing brands to scenario plan and wargame.
It can plug in first-party and external data sources to provide a more holistic picture of marketing effectiveness.
“There’s an inherent assumption in a lot of the marketing effectiveness techniques that whatever happened before, we can learn from it and then apply it to the future. It is our belief that we need to not only understand the past and ‘why’ with deep insights, but then we need to integrate it in with foresight, with a much deeper understanding of what might the world look like a month from now, a year from now or five years from now,” Kaufman said.
Attribution is no panacea
Kaufman has been around the market effectiveness block for decades, watching trends emerge from MMM to attribution, analytics and forecasting and back to MMM.
She said that multi-touch attribution never delivered on its promise because it tends to skew results towards digital channels that are easier to measure and under-index on analogue media.
Nonetheless, and partly due to the challenging economic client, there has been a rise in ‘attribution’ on client RFIs.
“It’s interesting, you can almost sense the tide of the industry by the RFIs that we receive from clients and what they’re asking for,” she said. “It was MMM, attribution back to MMM and there are some RFIs that are coming in that are asking not so much for last click as going back to attribution more broadly.
“There’s a misconception that attribution or MTA are the only solutions that can get you to certain granular insights, but we’ve been able to show clients we can granular insights without user-level data matching. So we try to steer them clear of that because there are a lot of challenges to getting a pure play attribution solution up and running.”
She added: “What I always encourage clients to do is stop talking about the technique or the methodology because there are 50,000 different techniques that can be employed for different things.
“We start with the end in mind. If we understand the use case that we’re trying to solve for, there may be an entirely different technique that is better for that specific business question.”
Gain Theory’s growth plans in an increasingly competitive Australian MMM and analytics market will be one to watch in 2025.
