If you want to know which way the wind is blowing in ad measurement, follow the people changing jobs.
On Wednesday, marketing mix modeling (MMM) platform Mutinex announced that Mike Finnerty is leaving TransUnion to become its US president and lead the company’s expansion stateside.
Finnerty spent more than four years as SVP of marketing solutions at TransUnion, arriving there via its $3.1 billion acquisition of Neustar in 2021.
Founded in 2018 in Australia, Mutinex built its business at home before opening a New York office last year. The company positions itself as an agentic MMM platform that helps CMOs and CFOs see eye to eye – which they often don’t, according to industry vet Lou Paskalis, who’s stepping into a senior go-to-market advisor role at Mutinex.
That crackling tension in the C-suite is usually the result of fuzzy or conflicting measurement. CMOs roll up armed with dashboards and incrementality studies, while all CFOs can see is marketing spend going out the door alongside murky proof that it’s driving profitable growth.
“This is an opportunity for marketers to change the narrative that marketing is a cost center,” Paskalis said. “Most enterprises today see marketing as a tax, not an investment, and I think we can flip that model.”
MMMakeover
For all the new terminology floating around – “agentic” this and “AI-powered” that – many of the underlying measurement problems in marketing are stubbornly familiar.
For example, marketers are still trying to reconcile user-level attribution that lives inside walled gardens with a broader, econometric view of what’s actually moving their business. And although MMM is having a bit of a revival as cookies and device IDs become increasingly hard to come by, the methodology is haunted by its reputation for being slow, expensive and backward-looking.
“Most people associate market mix modeling with heavy consulting-led projects,” said Mutinex CEO and Co-Founder Henry Innis.
Instead of producing a measurement study that shows up months later as a 60-page deck, Innis said, Mutinex is trying to make MMM behave more like an always-on planning and optimization tool.
“You have to look at the calories that your organization is burning to get to the answers,” Finnerty said. “If it takes an inordinate amount of time and energy to get there, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
All those calories
Sticking with Finnerty’s analogy, the amount of calories marketers have to burn to get answers has only increased as privacy rules tighten and platform data gets more siloed.
And although “elaborate” tools and test-and-control programs can help marketers answer specific questions, Finnerty said, these often don’t translate well into budget conversations with the CFO, whose only concern is the P&L.
On top of that, there’s the simple reality of prioritization, as in, there ain’t enough hours in a marketer’s day.
“I’ve got 50 priorities from my boss, and missing any of them is bad,” Paskalis said. “So, [marketers say], I’ll deal with the broken measurement later – which is French for ‘never.’”
But even when marketers do find the time and budget for rethinking measurement, there’s still the question of what, exactly, they’re optimizing for.
Innis argues that the industry overall is looking at the wrong things. Too often, he said, the focus is on demonstrating lift in a platform’s own media metrics rather than digging into what’s happening in a brand’s business.
“What I actually want is for my measurement to correlate very heavily with my P&L,” Innis said.
‘Ripe for disruption’
Meanwhile, there’s also the awkward fact that the biggest ad platforms regularly evaluate their own performance.
“Google’s getting into measurement, Facebook’s got measurement – but they’re grading their own homework,” Paskalis said. “And, lo and behold, their stuff performs better.”
But marketers keep spending with the big platforms, despite their misgivings, because the audiences are there and because they get an easy button for reporting. Against that backdrop, Mutinex’s job is to prove that its MMM is just as easy to use and that it can function in the messy reality of large enterprises.
For Finnerty, who spent years selling identity and attribution products into large brands when he was at Neustar and TransUnion, the pitch is that a more automated, MMM-first approach can produce answers fast enough – and in plain enough terms – to matter in budget decisions.
Growth also means hiring. Mutinex has a small New York-based team today, roughly 10 people, and recently opened a larger Midtown office to make room for more.
The company started by bringing over key people from its Australian operation across customer success, engineering and data science while it tested product-market fit with early US clients. With that foundation in place, the plan now is to more than double the US headcount over the next six months.
It’s a bet that there’s room to run.
“If you look at the incumbents in the market,” Finnerty said, “I truly believe the space is ripe for disruption.”
