The co-founder of marketing mix modelling platform Mutinex is concerned that 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 a doom and gloom kind of person.
That can’t be.
But lately I’ve noticed that my own perception and orientation has become bleaker. Some of what Mutinex has said about conquering the market has influenced that. I think we need to improve and paint a better picture of advertising in general.
The thing is, I love our industry. And this is my love letter to it.
It’s full of crazy, smart, brilliant people doing crazy things to grow companies. That’s pretty damn cool. We need to embrace that.
But over time, I think our industry got hijacked. We brought in people with communications degrees and had them work with spreadsheets. We got ideas that had to go through ten levels of an agency to get them to the client. We took ourselves too seriously instead of building products that were fun.
We took the fun out of advertising.
And it’s time that I, as an industry, challenge everyone to take that back. Our industry was never about deals. It was never about being seen at this awards show or that award show. It was never about what network you worked for.
It was about getting into a customer’s business and making it a little more fun. A little more human. A little more distinctive. A little more memorable.
This is the essence of our business and the humanity that we all need to rediscover within ourselves.
Yes, I’m a data person. Why do I say that? Because I firmly believe that our industry can take a more positive path if we embrace technology and use it to free up time to do exciting, impactful work.
Here is the truth about what we do at Mutinex:
- Nobody wants to spend days processing data
- Nobody wants to spend weeks modeling it
- Nobody wants to wait months for the result
And the same goes for retail advertising. The hardcore production machines. The use of creative resources. The things that are extremely complex and not pleasant for humans. We enjoy the hard work of thinking through problems, not the complexity that comes with trying to conform to machines.
Our profession is more caught up in the drudgery of analysis than in the passion for ideas that move people.
Of course, I believe that will change soon. SaaS-based market research is the future of this world. We see solutions like us, Tracksuit, MagicBrief and other great companies that give people the freedom to actually think. Technology and AI solutions that literally allow us to focus more on work.
What do I think this means?
Our industry has an exciting future ahead of it as we begin to embrace technology, and I think that will have an impact in some important ways.
Media agencies no longer have to justify every measure they take, but must plan campaigns strategically.
They have a brilliant sense of which content shows will be a hit this year.
Which creative campaigns will be a hit if you distribute them in a different way.
How paid and earned money fuel each other and lead to even greater effectiveness.
In many ways, the relationship between measurement technology and agencies, much like Salesforce/Adobe and the digital agencies, will catapult us into a far better future.
Creative agencies finally have the ammunition to invest in creativity so that they don’t water down ideas. Because they have the ammunition to show not only that creativity is what advertising needs, but that it also generates profit.
And we stop being schizophrenic as an industry. We no longer react to new fashions, but to what works. We plan the latest inputs instead of outputs. We do too much instead of doing the important things well.
We are making our industry human again.
I don’t know if Mutinex will be able to pull this off globally. Sometimes it scares me (I often have nightmares!). But I think we need to be more hopeful, excited and passionate about the change we can make as an industry.
We need to integrate this mindset into all advertising. To give people freedom. To bring humanity back into the game. And to prove and measure that we perform at our best when we let humanity shine in advertising.
Henry Innis is co-founder and global CEO of Mutinex
