When Max Osborne talks about the power of influence, he isn’t speaking in abstractions. A former snowboarder turned data scientist, Max has built ThisThat, a London-based analytics company, into what he calls the “brand-lift authority” in influencer marketing. Founded in 2017, the company partners with more than 50 leading agencies and 250 global brands, helping them quantify what most marketers only speculate about: how creator campaigns actually shape perception and behavior.

“I’d describe myself as a creative scientist,” Max says. “I went to music school, I was a competitive snowboarder, and then I decided to study mathematics. I fell in love with how you can optimize things with data.” That mindset, equal parts analytical and creative, would eventually lead him from code to the creator economy.

After completing a postgraduate degree in data science at the University of Edinburgh, he became the go-to person on campus for building apps and websites. That skill set met opportunity when a classmate asked if he could develop an app where users “swipe left for this, swipe right for that.” Max built it over a weekend, and thousands began using it within weeks. “That was the beginning of ThisThat,” he notes. “We used to be a social app. People were competing at university parties to vote on things.”

But success was short-lived. When Instagram introduced its own polling feature, Max realized his creation risked becoming obsolete. “We thought we were going to be the next Meta,” he says. “Then we realized we were just a feature.”

The setback prompted a fundamental rethink.

Pivoting Toward Proof

Rather than fold, Max and his team pivoted sharply. Around the same time, Qualtrics was acquired by SAP for $8 billion, spotlighting the value of survey data and market research. “I thought, ‘There’s a lot of money to be made in the survey world,’” Max says.

He ran early experiments comparing ThisThat’s gamified survey flow to traditional survey tools. In those tests, completion rates were often up to ten times higher, according to Max. “That was at least ten times better,” he says. “When you’re in the startup space, you look for where you’re ten times better, because that’s where you can build something real.”

But, while the technology worked, the business model didn’t … at least not yet. “We made no money for the first few years,” Max admits. “We had to learn the hard way that it’s smarter to know a problem and solve it than to build something cool and try to find the problem later.”

The real opportunity emerged in 2021 when an influencer marketing agency asked ThisThat to measure brand lift – a data-driven method for quantifying how advertising changes consumer perception. Max believes the curiosity paid off: “Four years later, we’re the global authority in brand lift for influencer marketing. I didn’t even know what it was when they asked.”

Brand Lift for the Influencer Era

Traditional research firms such as Nielsen and Kantar measure brand lift by paying users to watch ads and answer surveys. Max believes that approach fails to capture the nuances of creator-driven marketing: “That works for TV ads, but if you’re measuring influencer campaigns, you’re reaching a specific community that’s chosen to engage with that creator. It’s a completely different relationship.”

ThisThat designed a system to survey two groups (those exposed to influencer campaigns and those who weren’t) and compare differences in awareness, consideration, and purchase intent. Unlike conventional research cycles that take weeks or months, ThisThat delivers results “within hours.”

The company also refined how performance is tracked. “We changed the standard question from ‘Do you remember seeing this ad?’ to ‘Where do you recall seeing ads for this brand?’” Max says, adding that the tweak allowed ThisThat to isolate the true incremental impact of influencer content versus other media channels, helping agencies justify return on investment and optimize future spend.

Today, its benchmark dataset includes more than 7 million community opinions, positioning the company as both a measurement platform and a strategic consultancy. “Our customers use us to reduce risk,” Max says. “We help them understand not just what worked, but why, and what to do next.”

The Psychology of Persuasion and Brand Love

As ThisThat expanded, Max’s background in data science merged with a fascination for human behavior. His team began correlating brand metrics with emotional factors like relevance, persuasion, and love. “Persuasive messaging will 3x purchase intent,” he notes. “Relevance makes someone 3.6 times more likely to consider a brand.”

But the most compelling discovery came from analyzing emotional attachment. “Love is the most important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) across everything,” Max says. “You want people to love your brand.”

To quantify that, ThisThat asks participants how they feel about a brand, ranging from ‘I love it’ to ‘I hate it.’ Then it cross-references emotional affinity with behavioral data. “There are three things you need to do to make someone fall in love with your brand,” Max says. “You spark curiosity, you sate that curiosity, and you stay relevant the entire time.”

The firm’s data shows that curiosity alone can triple brand love, and that influencer marketing consistently drives a 14-point lift in familiarity compared to unexposed audiences. “That’s quite remarkable,” he says. “We can see these relationships at scale now.”

A Thousand-Fold Return

One of ThisThat’s most notable partnerships came with Meta, when the company launched its Meta Quest headset. 

“We were their go-to-market partner,” Max says. Over nine months, his team helped Meta with creative, influencer, and media strategies using ThisThat’s measurement tools. “They were generating ROI (Return on Investment) up to 1,000x in some parts of the campaign,” Max says. “You never see a thousand-fold return. It was crazy.”

That project highlighted what Max believes is ThisThat’s most valuable contribution: translating creative intuition into shared, evidence-based learning. “Their creative, talent, media, and strategy teams were all speaking different languages,” he explains. “We became the glue that could prove their brilliance with data they couldn’t argue with.”

The Benchmark

As influencer marketing has matured, so too has its accountability gap. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) recently identified influencer campaigns as the most effective marketing channel, yet also the most variable in performance. 

Max sees ThisThat’s mission as addressing that variability head-on. “Influencer marketing can deliver outlier returns, but it can also backfire,” he says. “We help teams reduce that risk and maximize what works.”

Serving as a SaaS platform for self-serve measurement and a managed service for strategic insight, ThisThat has attracted top agencies seeking faster, more actionable analytics. “People used to wait months for results,” Max says. “Now they can optimize campaigns in real time.”

The broader goal, he adds, is to elevate measurement itself. “Performance marketing and brand building aren’t opposites. They’re in harmony. You can’t play a good song with one instrument.”

Influence in the Community Era

Max believes the marketing industry is entering a new phase that he calls “the community era.” “In the 1920s, marketing was about reach,” he notes. “In the 1990s, it became about personalization. But now, effectiveness isn’t enough. We see thousands of ads a day, and people are becoming apathetic. Influence has moved to communities: friends, creators, and comment threads.”

According to Max, that shift explains both influencer marketing’s growth and its challenges. “Brands are losing control of their brands,” he says. “Communities have the control now.”

To meet that reality, ThisThat is developing new frameworks for measuring influence beyond awareness or reach. Max says the firm’s next phase will integrate its insights directly into marketing-tech platforms and social networks, and publish its intelligence data more broadly. “We want to lift the industry,” he says. “Offering intelligence for free is smart. It helps people see what matters, and it brings them to us when they need to measure.”

Toward a Smarter Future for Measurement

In the coming 12 to 18 months, ThisThat plans to double down on strategic intelligence, helping clients determine which KPIs truly matter. “Ad recall doesn’t matter,” Max says. “Awareness alone isn’t enough. Consideration is the lever that drives everything down the funnel.”

Long-term, his sights are set on rewriting how brand value itself is measured. Max points to Kantar’s long-standing Meaningful, Different, and Salient (MDS) framework as an example of a legacy system misaligned with today’s market dynamics. “It worked in the personalization era, but it doesn’t work anymore,” he says. “Our intelligence shows that the way brand is measured today is wrong.”

His vision is to replace “outdated” models with systems built around real influence. “Over the next three to five years, I want to help everyone master the power of influence to grow their brand,” Max says. “That’s the future of marketing, and we’re building the tools to prove it.”

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