The co-founder of the marketing mix modelling platform Mutinex is concerned the industry has been hijacked by spreadsheets, too many layers of bureaucracy and the “drudgery” of analysis, rather than creativity. In this love letter, Henry Innis says he wants to make the advertising industry more human again.
I’m not one for doom and gloom.
I can’t be.
But recently, I’ve noticed my own perception and orientation being gloomy. Some of what Mutinex has put out there about smashing the market has influenced that. I think we have a job to do in improving and painting a better picture of advertising generally.
Here’s the thing: I love our industry. And this is my love letter to it.
It’s full of zany, smart, brilliant people trying to do insane things to grow businesses. That’s fucking cool. We need to own that.
Along the way, though, in my view our industry got hijacked. We got people with communications degrees and made them work out of spreadsheets. We got ideas that had to go through ten layers of an agency to get put in front of the customer. We took ourselves too seriously, rather than made products fun.
We took the fun out of advertising.
And it’s time, as an industry, that I implore everyone to get it back. Our industry was never about deals. It was never about being seen at this award or that award. It was never about which network you worked for.
It was about coming into a client’s business and making them a bit more fun. A bit more human. A bit more distinctive. A bit more memorable.
That is the essence of our business, and the humanity we all need to rediscover in ourselves.
Yes, I’m a data guy. So why am I saying this? Because I truly believe in a more positive path for our industry as we embrace tech and use it to free ourselves up to do the fun and impactful work again.
Here’s the truth about what we do at Mutinex:
- No one wants to spend days wrangling data
- No one wants to spend weeks modelling it
- No one wants to wait months waiting for the result
And the same is true for retail ads. The hardcore production engines. The deployment of creative assets. The things that are super complex for humans to do, and not enjoyable. We enjoy the graft of thinking through problems, not the complexity of trying to match machines.
Our profession is caught in the drudgery of trying to figure out analysis, rather than the passion of ideas that move people.
Of course, I think that’s about to change. SaaS based market research is the future of this world. We’re seeing solutions like us, Tracksuit, MagicBrief and other great companies which are freeing people up to… actually think. Technology and AI solutions that are literally enabling us to focus on the work more.
What do I think this means?
An exciting future for our industry as we begin to embrace technology. I think it plays out in some key ways.
Media agencies move on from having to justify every action they take, to strategically planning campaigns.
They get brilliant at intuiting which content shows will be a hit this year.
What creative campaigns will go bang if you distribute them in a different way.
How paid and earned fuel each other to generate even more heights of effectiveness.
In many ways, much like Salesforce/Adobe and the digital agencies, the relationship between measurement technology and agencies is about to accelerate us into a far brighter future.
Creative agencies will finally have ammunition to invest in creative. To not water down ideas. Because they have ammunition to not just show creativity is what ads need, but it’s what generates profitability.
And we stop being schizophrenic as an industry. Reacting to new fads rather than what works. Planning the latest input, instead of outputs. Doing too much, rather than doing the important thing well.
We make our industry human again.
I don’t know if Mutinex will succeed at championing this across the world. Sometimes it scares me (I often have nightmares!). But I think we need to be more hopeful, more excited and more passionate about the change we can make as an industry.
We have to get that thinking throughout advertising. To free humans up. To bring humanity back in. And to prove and measure that when we let humanity shine in advertising, that’s when we are at our best.
Henry Innis is the co-founder and global CEO of Mutinex
