MMM Must Plug Directly Into Bidding Systems to Stay Competitive, Mutinex CEO Says
CANNES, France – Within six to 12 months, brands that fail to connect incrementality data directly into their programmatic bidding systems will find themselves at a structural disadvantage, according to the chief executive of a marketing measurement company.
IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study found that 61% of buyers expect to focus more time and resources on marketing mix modeling this year, while 62% plan to increase attention on incrementality measurement.
“I no longer see measurement as competitive advantage,” said Henry Innis, CEO, Mutinex, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “I actually describe choice of measurement vendor as creating measurement disadvantage and competitive disadvantage correspondingly quite a lot.”
Measurement’s sell-side problem
According to Innis, for the last decade, measurement has functioned primarily as a tool for media sellers to justify their value to buyers. Advertisers are now reclaiming control.
“Increasingly, the advertiser is now saying, ‘No, I’d like to take control of my measurement, and I want to control that measurement from the buy side,'” he said. “That’s the principle that Mutinex is trying to enable.”
Mutinex industrializes market mix modeling, spinning up hundreds of models at granular levels – geography, product lines, creative, format – so brands can analyze every dimension of their commercial operations. The company says it has reduced the cost of enterprise MMM programs that historically ran into the millions of dollars with legacy vendors.
Click-based measurement is ‘grossly irresponsible’
AI is accelerating the collapse of deterministic attribution. Large language models now sit in the discovery layer between consumers and brands, and those AI interfaces do not pass through clicks in ways conventional tracking can capture.
“I think actually every single brand will be forced off deterministic measurement,” Innis said. “I don’t think it is possible in the age of AI and every single AI platform being its own walled garden, compounding the effect of walled gardens, for a marketer to rely on deterministic measurement. In fact, I think it’s grossly irresponsible.”
Mutinex addressed that gap in August 2026, launching Signals, a capability inside its GrowthOS platform that measures a brand’s weekly presence across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, then connects AI-answer visibility to marketing mix data.
Scale remains unsolved
Open-source tools like Google’s Meridian and PyMC have democratized the techniques of market mix modeling. But Innis argued the industry is stuck on accuracy and scalability.
“If I run a Meridian model on weekly data, I’ve only really got 152 samples of data over three years. It’s not a lot of data,” he said. “I don’t think most brands have solved how to take the data, run a market mix model quickly, do it across hundreds of products, deliver that at scale back into ad buying platforms, and in a way where an agentic media buying system could pick it up.”
Emarketer’s 2026 report on MMM trends echos that: only 28% of marketers say their organization is very effective at converting MMM insights into action.
Incrementality as bidding signal
The next frontier, Innis argued, is wiring incrementality data into programmatic buying logic so that bids reflect business value rather than just cost efficiency.
“I think it will be exceedingly difficult for brands not to be aligning their bidding strategies across programmatic and digital inventory to incrementality data,” he said. “I think that will reshape the ability of brands to bid on what’s valuable to their growth as opposed to a race to the bottom on CPM.”
Mutinex has piloted that approach with The Hershey Company and The Trade Desk. At Cannes Lions in June 2026, the three companies demonstrated outcome-based media activation designed to optimize toward incremental sales, revenue lift, and customer acquisition outcomes. Hershey’s measurement modernization involved analyzing $2 billion in annual media and trade spend and reducing model cycle times from several months to a few weeks.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Mutinex. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, France – Within six to 12 months, brands that fail to connect incrementality data directly into their programmatic bidding systems will find themselves at a structural disadvantage, according to the chief executive of a marketing measurement company.
IAB’s 2026 Outlook Study found that 61% of buyers expect to focus more time and resources on marketing mix modeling this year, while 62% plan to increase attention on incrementality measurement.
“I no longer see measurement as competitive advantage,” said Henry Innis, CEO, Mutinex, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “I actually describe choice of measurement vendor as creating measurement disadvantage and competitive disadvantage correspondingly quite a lot.”
Measurement’s sell-side problem
According to Innis, for the last decade, measurement has functioned primarily as a tool for media sellers to justify their value to buyers. Advertisers are now reclaiming control.
“Increasingly, the advertiser is now saying, ‘No, I’d like to take control of my measurement, and I want to control that measurement from the buy side,'” he said. “That’s the principle that Mutinex is trying to enable.”
Mutinex industrializes market mix modeling, spinning up hundreds of models at granular levels – geography, product lines, creative, format – so brands can analyze every dimension of their commercial operations. The company says it has reduced the cost of enterprise MMM programs that historically ran into the millions of dollars with legacy vendors.
Click-based measurement is ‘grossly irresponsible’
AI is accelerating the collapse of deterministic attribution. Large language models now sit in the discovery layer between consumers and brands, and those AI interfaces do not pass through clicks in ways conventional tracking can capture.
“I think actually every single brand will be forced off deterministic measurement,” Innis said. “I don’t think it is possible in the age of AI and every single AI platform being its own walled garden, compounding the effect of walled gardens, for a marketer to rely on deterministic measurement. In fact, I think it’s grossly irresponsible.”
Mutinex addressed that gap in August 2026, launching Signals, a capability inside its GrowthOS platform that measures a brand’s weekly presence across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, then connects AI-answer visibility to marketing mix data.
Scale remains unsolved
Open-source tools like Google’s Meridian and PyMC have democratized the techniques of market mix modeling. But Innis argued the industry is stuck on accuracy and scalability.
“If I run a Meridian model on weekly data, I’ve only really got 152 samples of data over three years. It’s not a lot of data,” he said. “I don’t think most brands have solved how to take the data, run a market mix model quickly, do it across hundreds of products, deliver that at scale back into ad buying platforms, and in a way where an agentic media buying system could pick it up.”
Emarketer’s 2026 report on MMM trends echos that: only 28% of marketers say their organization is very effective at converting MMM insights into action.
Incrementality as bidding signal
The next frontier, Innis argued, is wiring incrementality data into programmatic buying logic so that bids reflect business value rather than just cost efficiency.
“I think it will be exceedingly difficult for brands not to be aligning their bidding strategies across programmatic and digital inventory to incrementality data,” he said. “I think that will reshape the ability of brands to bid on what’s valuable to their growth as opposed to a race to the bottom on CPM.”
Mutinex has piloted that approach with The Hershey Company and The Trade Desk. At Cannes Lions in June 2026, the three companies demonstrated outcome-based media activation designed to optimize toward incremental sales, revenue lift, and customer acquisition outcomes. Hershey’s measurement modernization involved analyzing $2 billion in annual media and trade spend and reducing model cycle times from several months to a few weeks.
You’re watching The Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions 2026, presented by Mutinex. For more videos from this series, please visit this page. You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
