Y&R exiles Henry Innis and Matt Farrugia launch marketing consultancy Mutiny
The former managing director of Y&R Melbourne, Matt Farrugia, and ex-national engagement strategy director, Henry Innis, have launched marketing consultancy Mutiny.
Innis, who departed Y&R in August, said Mutiny “sits a lot more in that consultancy space than perhaps people would expect” and it is able to audit the outcomes of companies such as “customer churn, media strategy, value of media spend and missed revenue”.
“And then once you have built the auditing of their data, what strategy and what implementation they should be making, particularly with potentially their existing parters and how they can measure and benchmark success,” Innis continued.
According to its website, Mutiny is being positioned as “the machine + human marketing consultancy”. Innis will be based in Sydney, with Farrugia in Melbourne.
Farrugia, left and Innis were both senior Y&R staffers
Innis – who will be managing partner and chief strategy officer – told Mumbrella the consultancy has so far been helping clients “make sense of what their data is telling them”, as well as offering advice on what they should and shouldn’t be investing in.
According to Innis, Mutiny pits itself against the other management consulting firms such as PwC, Deloitte and Accenture arguing that the bigger players are “accountants with a structurally flawed business model”.
“They create a 50 paged powerpoint presentation for two million dollars and then no one can use it at the end,” Innis added.
Farrugia, who is now Mutiny’s CEO after resigning from Y&R in October, said the consultancy will offer its clients “speed for value”. The company has since merged with fellow WPP agency VML to become VMLY&R
“When you are talking from a marketing perspective, there is very little execution experience from a consultancy point of view. The difference is that with the offering we have, we are going to position ourselves as an alternative, we would be of those similar services but we would be incredibly more nimble, pragmatic with our approach and focused on speed for value.”
“What we are trying to do is come at it from a different approach and go well can we process that data and interrogate that data using some machine learning and some technology, to do it without having those large head counts to achieve a similar result,” Innis added.
Faruggia said: “There have been some major investments over the last decade and a big shift in terms of marketing spend as we know it towards marketing technology, but we noticed and shared the same vision of this marketing technology not being completely utilised and the value you can get from the marketing technology platforms not being completely leveraged.”
In his new role as chief strategy officer, Innis will be developing the strategic services and remain product focused while Faruggia will be focused on the operations of the business.
Although at this stage the business consists of Innis and Faruggia, Mutiny intends to “grow big and fast”.
“We do not plan to just stay in the Australian market, we plan to build scale out of multiple markets, I don’t think that we are building this business with the intention of having something which is small, in the Australian market and then gets acquired, we want to build something that is big and something that plays a real role in shaping the industry in years to come,” Innis said.
Innis said investing in future acquisitions is not “off the table” and it is something the business is “actively considering”.
The pair said they would be making client announcements at the beginning of next year.
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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The Maltese Falcon flies again. Good luck.
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There’s already a marketing agency called Mutiny that has been operating in the region for several years.
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Are the offices at Left Bank?
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First order of business – new headshots for Hern! Congrats fellas, looking forward to seeing what’s ahead.
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Light up the industry. You’ll crush it.
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Congrats guys – best of luck.
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Congrats Henry & Matt. Wishing you every success for the future!
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