Ex-OMG CEO Cheuk Chiang joins Mutiny as investor, partner and chairman
Former Omnicom Media Group APAC CEO, Cheuk Chiang, has joined marketing consultancy Mutiny as a partner, investor and chairman.
Chiang stepped down from his role at Omnicom in April last year after spending five years at the helm and a decade with the group.
Mutiny’s leadership team Innis, Wray, Chiang and Farrugia
Throughout his career, Chiang has also held positions as the APAC CEO at PHD, managing director at Cummins&Partners and group account director at M&C Saatchi.
In a statement, Chiang said he was attracted to Mutiny’s positioning and its proposition to be the “world’s first predictive advertising agency”.
“For a long time now, our industry has been struggling to re-invent itself. A lot of agencies are still chained to the past with legacy structures.
“The answer isn’t just about being more integrated, data driven, or customer driven, the answer has been staring us in the face with the coming of the fourth industrial revolution.
“I like that [Mutiny’s] focus is not just on the data or the technology, but how they can find a better way to leverage the power of both through artificial and human intelligence.
“Predictive advertising is truly the next frontier of our industry and I’m excited and humbled to be part of this new future.”
Chiang joins Mutiny just three months after the marketing consultancy launched into the market, positioning itself as different to the other bigger players that are “accountants with a structurally flawed business model”.
Mutiny was founded by the former managing director of Y&R Melbourne, Matt Farrugia, and ex-national engagement strategy director, Henry Innis.
Just last month Mutiny also hired PwC’s Harriet Wray as its chief operating officer.
Matt Farrugia, CEO of Mutiny Group, added: “Cheuk’s visionary approach and success in building successful companies speaks for itself. We are ambitious about scaling and his experience and strong ties with the tech and investor communities locally and globally, will bring a huge advantage to our business and our clients.”
Mutiny has already partnered with companies including IBM, Salesforce, Google and Facebook.
Henry Innis, CSO of Mutiny, said the business is looking to expand into global markets.
“Cheuk’s experience in managing businesses in this context is unparalleled. Its pretty humbling that he saw and understood our vision to revolutionise the industry through technology, talent and techniques to deliver cutting-edge predictive advertising solutions for our clients. We’re simply thrilled to have him as a partner.”
Abigail Dawson was Mumbrella's senior content journalist covering event content. She left Mumbrella to move into an agency role in 2020.
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Thats huge. Congrats Cheuk, and team Mutiny.
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Well done Cheuk. I look forward to seeing how this mutiny unfolds!
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he has definitely found a company that is right for him – good and bad
btw, what’s with the matching clothes?
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Where is Chris Innis floating around in all this I wonder?
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Hate to be the one to ask but what exactly is predictive advertising? Love the amount of marketing jargon in all your press releases though, great stuff.
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Quite simple, happy to explain.
We plug into mar-tech, content and programmatic APIs. Analyse everything using what is called a ‘deep learning’ algorithm (our IP). We can then use that to build statistical models of where money can be used to drive improvements in marketing spend.
We then use data to project what improvement that will be in a dollar figure for clients, set commercial targets and so on. That’s why clients like us (especially CFOs).
It is digitally skewed, but as all media will be programmatically bought in 5 or so years, we’ll be well placed to capitalise.
Important to note — we’ll probably never deliver a big brand campaign or idea, but we’ll certainly know how to analyse the data around it to shape the brief, much like the Big 4 management consultants or Bain and McKinsey would.
If you put a name to your comment, or email me directly, I’m happy to show you the technology over coffee. It’s pretty cool and tends to replace a lot of the head hours the management consultants would charge to do the same piece of analysis.
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Agency uses Watson out of the box – claims to be AI driven. There is an opportunity in this space but until there are unique data and computer science capabilities in house, it’s all the same stuff packaged differently.
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To clarify, we don’t use Watson out of the box. Most of our solution is proprietary and built/owned by us.
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If that’s the case it’s strange that you don’t have a CTO on your leadership team then. Feels like they would be the most important person in delivering the product.
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You have promised 15% more competitive advantage for CMOs. Exactly how is ‘competitive advantage’ quantified?
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It’s a good point, but I’m fairly skilled up now in developing the algorithms piece and Harriet has extensive experience in scoping, delivering and running these projects from a product management perspective. We can brief very tightly, whole thing is built in Python as well so easy for myself to review code.
We also have access to 2-3 solution architects who we’ve worked closely with on other businesses which fulfil a similar role.
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Agree – the whole thing has a waft of snake oil about it.
Without any data scientists or engineers on board it looks like a bunch of ex planners and corporates talking a bunch of talk.
But press releases can only say so much – maybe still waters run deep and this thing will take off. If you’ve actually got the tech and the people to pull it off, it’s a great idea.
If so, more power to you Henry.
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Good on you, Matt and co.
Good to see some upstarts having the brains and balls to go in a different direction to the usual mob. I wonder if the cynicism on display here would be same if you were launching just another creative agency promising planning, creative and account management. Probably not…there’s a smell of fear in these comments.
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Thanks Tim – looking forward to the future, that’s for sure 🙂
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Good luck with this. Proprietary tech is important to make a play like this work. Can we get a demo?
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