Six months after launching, Mutinex’s ChatGPT-style tool Hendren has been growing gangbusters, not just in terms of volume of queries but also the sophistication of questions. B&T caught up with Mutinex and one of its clients, pizza chain Domino’s, to find out more.
Named after the Norse god of knowledge, marketers have increasingly been turning to Mutinex’s Hendren to help them work out media channel performance and budget optimisation.
Launched last August at an invite-only Mutinex conference, Hendren was sold as a MMM tool that would create a whole new category of marketing analytics – Business Answers Modelling (BAM).
The tool operates similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT by providing real-time, quick responses to questions about how a brand’s media mix is performing, and advice on the next ways to optimise spend.
Mutinex marketing science director Nicky Barton told B&T that the volume of requests had grown rapidly, particularly in the three months leading into Christmas.
“In the past quarter we’ve seen a 210 per cent increase on our query volume, including a 109 per cent increase in November alone…it’s gone crazy,” he said.
“I believe that is down to marketers need a rapid response to queries and being able to receive an answer in 30 seconds has been a real game changer.”
Barton said that the two most common types of questions are to do with channel performance and budget optimisation.
“Most of the questions we’re getting is in terms of performance and how that’s affecting the business,” he explained. “But heading into Q1 2025, we are also receiving a lot more optimisation questions that are short term and reactionary, such as where we should change our marketing mix in January and February.
“I was in a marketing meeting last week for an organisation where they were reporting back on marketing and one of the tables that they’d pulled out was actually straight from Hendren.”
It is this third area – how best to explain and illustrate the data for c-suite level board reports and other internal communications – that has interested marketers speaking to B&T.
How Hendren is being used
Domino’s group head of insights, Blake Rand, told B&T that Hendren could save up to 12 hours per month in helping his team build their internal reports.
Domino’s uses Mutinex for most of its “always on MMM” across its Asia Pacific markets and plans to onboard the tool in Europe this year.
The pizza chain has to work with external partners, such as aggregators like Uber Eats and DoorDash, to create a full picture of how its media spend is used effectively.
The business has used Mutinex’s GrowthOS for scenario building across multiple media channels and began trialing Hendren in the lead up to Christmas.
“Where we’ve found Hendren useful is giving us a head start where we can ask it questions about what are trends in media channels over the last few months,” Rand said. “It reduces the time to get to a draft version 1 and then go and get any business context that we think we’re missing.
“It has also benefited us internally to show other stakeholders that we are partnering with Mutinex, who are investing heavily in generative AI, and that it is adding value and saving time.”
This year, Rand would like to use Hendren to produce content for results packs that Domino’s marketing and analytics team shares internally.
“We basically want Hendren to be able to output those visualisations and the draft notes for us, and then we just need to human review and to tweak and polish them. It would take a lot of the grunt work out for us and that’s going to be a big step change for us this year,” he added.
“It gives us more time to try and better understand the full picture, as opposed to spending so much time trying to understand what’s happening from a media channel perspective.”
Earlier this week, Mutinex hired Jess Betts, Andie Potter and Jon Betts to bolster its data and analytics team.
