Media Mayhem: Danny Bass – ‘In 2025, marketers must be ruthless’
These are interesting times, and the challenges faced by Australian marketing and media are frequently diabolical. There is always opportunity in a crisis, but rarely a single solution that is easy to see. Many are worried, searching for answers, and seeking guidance from our best thinkers. At Mumbrella, we want to interview industry leaders to understand their insights and learn how they handle the challenges and structure for the future. We hope this can help inspire our industry to trade through the storms and deliver the best work on the global stage.
To kick off Media Mayhem for 2025, we sit down with Mutinex's chief revenue officer, Danny Bass.
How is the operating environment impacting your team, your clients, and or your partners?
We work with dozens of major brands and we’re talking with marketers every day.
With inflationary pressures, rising costs, and continued uncertainty in the market, Australian businesses are facing tighter budgets and more intense scrutiny than ever. In particular, finance teams and senior leadership are demanding more tangible proof of ROI for every dollar spent on marketing. This is clearly demonstrated by our most recent MROI report – which shows a persistently flat trend in marketing investment throughout 2024.
It’s clear that marketers can no longer rely on the flimsy metrics provided by MTA; they need to show direct, measurable impact that clearly aligns with business goals on a speedy cadence designed to keep finance teams at bay.
We see businesses thriving in this environment when they focus on smarter, more sustainable ways of collecting, analysing, and using data to drive decision-making. This unlocks the type of agility that allows marketers to lead the marketing investment conversation instead of playing catch up – especially if they can deliver regular and reliable forecasting of spend against key business outcomes.
What changes are you seeing in consumer behaviours and preferences? How are you meeting them?
In Australia, the cost of living crises is biting at the heels of consumers. We’re getting some good signs that inflation is slowing down, but it’s clear that consumers aren’t feeling the impact of that yet and high interest rates continue to shrink the pie for businesses.
In 2024, my colleagues at Mutinex argued that brands need to stop trying to wait this situation out by skewing investment so heavily towards the lower funnel – that strategy is actually just increasing costs in performance channels and not delivering incremental gains.
It’s going to take some time for the economy to meaningfully improve. So in 2025, marketers must be ruthless about what’s working and what’s not. Again, key business outcomes should be at the center of this assessment instead of media metrics.
When you lift your eyes from the screen to the media and marketing horizon, how are you planning?
In the context we’ve discussed above, it’s easy to see that the major barrier to success for most marketers will be streamlining the data that helps to drive good decisions around business (not media) metrics. At the moment, many businesses and their agency partners are oriented around a set of media data silos that operate on separate schemas and don’t functionally connect. It’s impossible to make decisions on the basis of this data.
We’ve already made big strides towards overcoming this barrier for marketers but we’re not finished yet. It’s our intent to overhaul the way the advertising industry deals with data.
Rocks we’ve already shifted include building a product that allows marketers to connect, clean and store marketing data from every channel in a standardised schema (DataOS) and forging partnerships with agencies like UM to unlock the flow of data direct from the source.
Data portability doesn’t stop there though. These are just the first steps towards an ambitious goal – the creation of an MMM Data Standard that can be adopted by any touchpoint in the marketing/advertising lifecycle – something that we hope to partner with industry bodies like the IAB on in the near future.
We want an ecosystem where data is not only clean and consistent but also genuinely valuable in informing business decisions and driving growth. Through industry-wide collaboration and data standardisation, we aim to empower brands to unlock the full potential of their marketing spend and deliver measurable, long-term value.
What opportunities do you see, and how are you positioning your organisation?
The challenges we’re seeing in Australia aren’t unique to this market – in the US, Europe and the rest of APAC we see marketers trying to hold back a tide of economic uncertainty and build the data structures that will provide their businesses with clarity.
Mutinex will simplify the data chaos, reduce noise and create the insights that drive action. And we will do so at the speed of the market. We will make data easy.
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Got a tip?
Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
Linkedin
Have your say