Marketing’s Moneyball Moment

Why is marketing the only board-level discipline that still relies on gut feel? In the Private Equity world, we demand cold, hard accountability from Finance, HR, and Sales. We’ve sorted the IT stacks, rebooted the sales teams, and the new people officer is working out great. But when it comes to marketing, the room often goes quiet. It is seen as a black box or discretionary cost, rather than a driver of growth.

The days of marketing being a dark art are over. We have built a platform that treats marketing with the same clinical rigour as an engineering audit. We call it Marketing System Efficiency (or MSE).

We’ve built a service that is essentially Moneyball for marketing.

Using proprietary, analytical methodologies powered by AI, MSE evaluates marketing efficacy for a potential acquisition or across an entire competitive set. It strips away the vanity metrics, such as the clicks and likes that provide proof of nothing, and focuses on the twenty-seven different, auditable pieces of data that actually drive value creation.

It operates without requiring the cooperation, or even the permission, of any third party. This is a breakthrough for PE houses that have been uncharacteristically incurious about what's working and what's not in their portfolio. By using AI to run these models at a speed we humans could never replicate, we can show you areas of excellence and improvement across any business in a single day.

It is time to stop guessing and start having sensible, data-driven, adult conversations about where to focus. Marketing is too big a number to ignore, often ranging from 10% to 30% of overall business OPEX. It's time to demand the same degree of accountability from your marketing turnaround as you do from your finance team.