After lunch, day one here at the TIMT Conference. We are super excited to be joined by MNTN CEO, Mark Douglas. Thank you for spending some time with us.
Thanks for inviting me.
As part of introductions to the company, I think my favorite way to do it is to ask the presenter how you found the company and really what attracted you to MNTN, and then maybe how that opportunity has evolved over the time you've been there?
Yeah, absolutely. The way I saw it is there's this very big market, this consumer engagement medium called television. More people watch television today than use social media, than drive. 5.5 billion people, blow. More people watch TV today than drive automobiles. That medium was really cut off from small and mid-sized businesses, e-commerce brands, travel brands, kind of all these companies that access search and social in order to find their next customers. They weren't able to do that on television. With the advent of streaming TV, we saw this enormous opportunity to essentially bring those companies into the television ecosystem and create this big opportunity for them to find customers and obviously a big opportunity for MNTN. 97% of MNTN customers have never advertised on TV before. We've literally expanded. We've created our own TAM and expanded that opportunity for them and us.
That was the intro to my next question. You said 97% of your customers are brand new to TV advertising. I mean, talk a little bit then about your customer acquisition strategy of how do you find people that have never done something before and convince them to give it a shot with MNTN?
Yeah. I think first off, that sounds a little louder now. I think the first thing is that really any reasonable size, small, mid-sized business can leverage TV. There's a pretty big long tail. We estimate about 1.5 million small businesses in America can eventually be on streaming TV. That's the market opportunity that we're pursuing. What's critical for them is they don't come into this medium wanting a TV ad. They come in this wanting new traffic to their brand. They want to find new customers. You don't call Google and say, "Can I buy an ad from you?" You call Google and you say, "Can I get traffic that's going to potentially buy from my brand?" We had to present our platform, the Mountain Performance TV platform, to them in a very similar way.
Here's a platform where you can come in, figure out who your target consumer is, build campaigns, build creative because they don't have TV commercials when we sold them, and then measure the impact to your business. That is the Mountain Performance TV platform. We see it as a very, very big opportunity. We're just literally scratching the surface right now.
Yeah. And maybe a second half of that question, when people do land, how do they typically ramp with MNTN? What do you usually see from the first week to the first month to the first year of a new customer?
Yeah. So the first thing is just in terms of how they even discover MNTN, our MNTN's platform is our number one lead generation platform.
Oh, so just organic?
Right. We stream TV commercials, MNTN-branded TV commercials into the homes of our future customers. The majority of our customers actually reach out to us without any sales rep involved or anything like that. They come on our platform, they create a Mountain Performance TV account, and they start building their first campaigns on our platform. As they see results, their key metric is return on ad spend. It is not number of ad impressions. It is, "If I spend $1,000, I am hoping to see $3,000 in revenue." That is a common metric in the performance marketing industry. That is their number one metric. If they see that result on that platform, they will spend more. They have a starting budget and a starting goal for return on ad spend, and their spend just ramps from there as they see the results.
Yeah. No, I mean, that's a fantastic customer acquisition cost when you're able to leverage our platform?
Yeah.
Generative creatives, you mentioned it for a second.
Yeah.
I've got to assume that's one of the reasons 97% of these customers have never tried TV before, is it probably never felt accessible to have a video ad. How are you helping enable this part of the market?
Yeah. So I mean, that's one aspect, and I want to address that. But before MNTN, I mean, they viewed it as running a TV campaign was like, "I have to hire a big agency and make a big budget commitment and get into an upfront and do all.
All the aspects felt unattainable, not just making the ad?
Exactly. I have to find a creative agency, and an 18-wheeler is going to roll up with cameras out the back. It just all seemed unaccessible. I believe, to my knowledge, when we launched our platform, it was the first time in the history of television you did not have to have an agency to launch a campaign on television. You can just go to our software platform, build the campaign, and maybe if you had an in-house video team, have video for the campaign, and you could launch, and you were live on television. That was the solution that we brought into the market. In terms of creative now at scale, we have Quick Frame AI, which we introduced very recently.
Before that, we had Quick Frame Marketplace, which is a marketplace of thousands of independent creators that we connected the creators with the brand, almost like an Uber for creative. That was the solution to get creative at very reasonable cost, between $2,500 and maybe as high as $5,000. That took about 40 days. With Quick Frame AI, it takes less than a day to get creative. The quality is outstanding, and we brought the cost down by 10x. It is now hundreds of dollars to get your first TV ad, first and many after TV ads versus thousands of dollars before. You can do it in 100x less time. Basically, it is a two orders of magnitude reduction in time and one order of magnitude reduction in cost. It has been fantastic.
Yeah. I feel like we've kind of set the stage now for how the SMB is able to enter into this TV market. Maybe switching to why it's important that they do. I think sometimes when I'm talking with investors, it's counterintuitive that these SMB advertisers can outbid Fortune 500 companies, right, for content, for inventory, and that they can see higher CPMs. Can you just talk a little bit about kind of what drives that dynamic and the importance of data, I guess, on helping enable these smaller, more valuable audiences?
Yeah. I think the first thing is that there's sometimes a thought that, "Oh, the SMB market must get the leftover content." The fastest growing segment of the CTV industry is SMB. We created that segment in the market. For the streaming networks, when they aggregate the spend that they're seeing out of MNTN for these networks, and remember, spend is a multiple of our revenue, when they see the spend, this is one of the largest sources of revenue and also the fastest growing. That is very attractive to the network. They are getting placement on over 200 streaming networks in our platform with the ads precisely placed to their future customers. Every aspect of that is measured and optimized.
AI optimization of the audience, optimization of the creative now with Quick Frame AI, and then optimization of when to place it, what network to place it on, what time of day to place it on, all these various factors. It all, they measure in terms of ultimately how many visits did I get from that, how much revenue I get, which feeds in the return on ad spend. I think we have some of the broadest place partnerships in the industry in terms of inventory. Again, all of it is premium because that's where it performs the best.
Yeah. I think the way someone described to me one time was that Coca-Cola wants to advertise to everyone with a mouth, right? And so the premium they're willing to pay for their best customer to their worst customer isn't that big of a difference?
It's actually very small. Yeah.
Yeah. When you're selling custom fishing rods, your ideal customer might be 100x the average customer. I guess from that standpoint, and you're saying that you're obviously doing very well partnering with publishers, how do you see the CTV environment kind of evolving over time? Do you see publishers looking to, are there ways publishers can better address this SMB market, help you guys better monetize this space?
I think the community of publishers, I think, have been in the past obsessed with CPM, right? It is cost per thousand impressions. We essentially taught them that the metric they should be focused on is what we refer to as share of wallet. I mean, what percentage of the whole marketing budget are you getting? If you want to get a higher share of wallet, you should give this cohort of customers the best content and at some of the best prices. That has created a competitive mode for us where the scale of the spend, we aggregate the entire spend of our customer base. It is presented to every media company as one big customer, which is MNTN.
If you want that to continue to grow and grow faster, we should keep prices low with the best quality content because that will induce the customer to spend more money because they're getting a higher return on ad spend, which then creates even more scale. You see the flywheel effect that starts to create. That's the flywheel effect we create over the last three years. Our costs have come down 70% over the last three years, generating even better returns for our customer and even more scale for the networks we partner with our customers and for MNTN.
When we talk about generating that better performance for your customers, performance in CTV has always been more of a challenging area, right? With it being expensive, but people seeing it as top of funnel. Can you just talk about how you're working to change that and kind of the key, I guess, dynamics to showing performance in this format?
Yeah. There's a few ways we do that. First, there's no clicks on a TV ad. That's kind of, I think, what you're referring to. Relatively speaking, most of your interaction on social media, I think about 70% of the time you're not clicking the ads, but it doesn't mean you're not responding to the ads. With MNTN, we do cross-device measurement, meaning there are multiple devices involved. The first device is always the television. If you pull out your phone, tablet, or computer and go visit that brand, we're able to see that through what's called tracking pixels. We know we stream the ad at 12:15 or let's say 8:15 at night, 8:20, they pulled out their phone and went to visit that brand. We know that that occurred. That's what we call a visit.
Maybe the next day you made a purchase. We know that too. All of that data is collected by our platform, reported in our platform. The customer also wants to see it using third-party tools, multi-touch attribution tools, mixed media modeling tools. We are partnered with many of the, pretty much all of those tools. I think it is roughly 11 different measurement platforms for the customer to get that data. They get all of our data plus all of the third-party data. That is true for MNTN. It is also true for search and social.
Yeah. We talked a little bit about how you talk to the publishers about share of wallet. When you're thinking about your own share of wallet of your customers, are there logical adjacencies for your platform that might eventually make sense to continue to monetize the customer base? Or is it more just kind of this organic growth of continuing to broaden out more of their CTV space?
Share of wallet growth is customers have confidence in the medium because the one thing to remember about performance marketing, we have not really talked about brand marketing. Brand marketing is a cost that larger brands bear in order because they feel like the Coca-Cola example, they just need to be present in a consumer's mind. Small, mid-sized businesses, they are focused on performance marketing, direct response of spending a dollar to make $3, as an example, right? They see it very differently. That difference is what is kind of key to making all this work. Remind me of the original question again.
Yeah. I was talking about there's logical adjacencies to your.
Oh, yeah.
If someone's spending $0.70 of their marketing budget, what would you do to get to the other $0.30? Or is it about expanding that $0.70?
That's what we're talking about, share of wallet. If they see the performance increase and they have the trust in the data, then they're generally going to move more spend into that direction. Remember, performance marketers, just like investors want a portfolio of where they're investing, performance marketers want the same. Right now, if you're a heavy spender on search, that might be declining for you because AI overviews on Google are kind of starting to negatively impact your ability to monetize search. You want to have investments as a marketer on social, on TV, on email in multiple places. It creates opportunities to expand that spend per customer by continuing to invest in the performance, in the technology that supports it. By the way, half of MNTN is engineers. One out of every two people that work at MNTN is on the engineering team.
We're constantly investing in the platform, in the technology, in AI to deliver that return on ad spend result for our customers.
Yeah. And the nice thing about delivering for your customers then these SMBs get bigger, and then they spend more money on MNTN.
Yeah. I like to call small business emerging.
Yeah.
Because that's what I'm hoping to contribute to.
You're building your own town.
Exactly.
I love it. Competitive landscape is always a little different in this space, right? It's not necessarily you rip somebody out. How do you think when you have those 50% of your company being engineers, how do you want them thinking about what competition means to MNTN?
Yeah. So we divide that in a few areas. I think the first is always North Star is always deliver the best performance for our customers. There is constant investments in different performance models, now AI models. Even with creative, we just launched Quick Frame AI. A lot of the new features are going to be geared around how do you drive more performance out of the creative. That is the biggest investment we are always making. The second is attribution. Customers want to be able to measure this, and they want to have confidence in all the data and measure it. Broad-based partnerships for measurement as well as our own measurement. Beyond there, it is new ad units, easier ways to go live on the platform, like getting live in fewer steps, being able to launch new campaigns faster.
Performance attribution and then just making that experience easier for more and more and more companies.
That's helpful. I guess maybe building on that, when you think of competitive moats, right? Because I mean, when you're growing really fast and you're proving how exciting of a market this is, you're going to have fast followers. You're going to have people either coming down market, and there's going to be people trying to recreate your success. What do you think is kind of the biggest moat that MNTN's built today?
Right. There's a few, but I think the biggest one is targeting. Ultimately, the biggest moat is offer the best performance, right? This is a different scenario than what you would think of as the ad industry. We view ourselves as a software platform to deliver direct response performance on streaming TV for our customers. Ultimately, the actual revenue you're generating for the customer is the biggest moat. All investments are around that performance. The other thing is it's hard to catch up. To my knowledge, there's never been a company that's the best performing performance marketing solution that has lost that lead. Anyone trying to catch up, you're not standing still, right? You're moving forward. You can see that, use as an example someone like Meta.
Instagram, I think most marketers feel like this just continues to get better and better in performance. That's multi-decade investment. MNTN is doing the same as it relates to streaming TV. That's always the biggest competitive advantage. I think the creative tools that we built are really compelling, and they are purpose-built for this market and also purpose-built for professional quality creative, full 30-second TV commercials. That's really important. Remember that flywheel effect, the largest company in space is going to have the most advantageous pricing. Return on ad spend is revenue from a campaign divided by its cost. If you have the lowest cost, you're going to likely have the highest return on ad spend, another thing that is very hard to catch up on. That flywheel is another competitive moat. We're looking at technology as a moat.
Basically, the scale of our company and the spend creates another moat, creative as a moat. I think also that marketing and sales motion is the fastest in the industry.
I know we've gone over a lot of these, but when we're thinking about the primary drivers for scaling revenue growth into the future for MNTN, it seems like the organic customer expansion continuing to ramp once you get inside these customers by showing that ROAS. How do you also think of margin expansion over time? I guess one thing that's kind of unique sometimes to the high-fixed cost environments is, is there a trade-off between margin growth and revenue growth?
Yeah. So in terms of gross margin, that grows 7%, 720 basis points year over year. And then our adjusted, and a lot of that, if not most of that, flows to our bottom line. We definitely have the ability to keep expanding our adjusted EBITDA margins, but we also are looking at that and balancing that with overall revenue growth for the company. I think we're not providing exact forecasts at this point on that, but I think we're pretty confident in our ability to keep moving forward and kind of expand those key metrics.
When you think about moving forward and those 50 engineers, I mean?
Oh, 50% of the company.
50% of the company. Thank you for, yeah, that's a good distinction. When we're thinking about kind of what they're working on, I guess we've talked a lot about the SMB or the emerging customer base. How much higher up market can you go from that? Has there ever been thought to the use cases? A lot of stuff you're building could be utilized outside of CTV and kind of how much thought process you've given to those two different aspects of how you grow your TAM over time?
Yeah. In terms of market, that would be enterprise. That's not an arena that we think that arena is pretty well served with The Trade Desk and others. We're more focused on how we can enable our mid-sized customers and small businesses to expand their investment on MNTN's platform. That's where a lot of the investment's going to. Providing more solutions, Quick Frame is an example of that, enhancements in our Performance TV platform for small business. With that many engineers, by the way, I'm a coding engineer myself. I wrote a lot of the original code for this platform. I'm fortunate I don't get to, I say unfortunate I don't get to code that much anymore. We're always looking, we're pretty creative and very forward-looking in terms of technology we bring for this.
There are opportunities in adjacent areas, but I think we're going to stay very focused on streaming TV for now. We think the market, the opportunity is huge. The market is huge. We're expanding the TAM, and we want to stay focused on this opportunity and continue to grow it for many years to come.
We've talked about generative, obviously, for the content creation. I guess more broadly, what are you seeing in the market for MNTN from generative and agentic AI? Then also, what are you hearing from your customers? Are people concerned about it? Has it come up in how people are thinking about their future spending plans?
Yeah. I mean, I view it a little more, so excellent investment. I think first and foremost, everyone recognizes this. I can get a lot of leverage through these technologies, but they also want to be differentiated, meaning they want to apply their own strategies and have their own brand. I view it, it's all artificial intelligence, but I kind of think of it as augmented intelligence, which is an underused term in the AI arena, which is at the center of everything is someone who's directing all this, has a vision, knows what they want their brand to be, what products they want to sell, and things like that. We view our platform as surrounding them with all of the AI technology to do that efficiently and continue to do it at lower and lower cost.
I think it's absolutely important and really important to allow a customer to have all this automation, but also have a big hand in how it's used. That's kind of how we've oriented our platform. You see it. I encourage you to go check out Quick Frame or go create an account on Mountain Performance TV, and you'll see it in there and that there's like it generates a video, but you can make edits to it. It generates a plan on how it's going to deploy your dollars, but you can adjust the plan. There's all this intelligence, but also you stay in the center of it is our view on it. We think that's the platform customers are going to like the most. It takes more effort to build, but it's well worth it.
Yeah. I want to take a second if there's any questions from the audience. Sorry. I should give you more of a heads-up for the mic.
How do you go to market? Is it kind of self-serve? Customers come to you, or is there an agency community that services these small businesses? Secondly, I throw in another one. You mentioned enterprise is well served by The Trade Desk, but why can't these customers use The Trade Desk?
The first question is more than three-quarters of MNTN's customers are inbound to MNTN. They find us, ironically, using our own platform. We use MNTN's platform to stream MNTN-branded TV commercials into the homes of our future customers. They also just increase organic search, which is our number two platform. They often, if you just put in connected TV or performance TV or anything, MNTN shows up very, very well in those search results, as well as in the AI search results. As a matter of fact, I think we're referenced in a lot of the AI search results, like directly referenced. You can learn more at MNTN. We're not paying for that. We have a really strong marketing team that's done a very good job of using those kinds of things. It creates very good economics also, which I think are important.
In terms of why couldn't these customers use something like The Trade Desk, the Trade Desk platform and other DSP platforms are built for media buyers and large agencies. These platforms are very, it's like asking someone who's using Robinhood, why don't you just get a Bloomberg terminal? It's just we're purpose-built to match two different needs. Trade Desk doesn't have the targeting, it's built for targeting for T-Mobile, not for a brand that's trying to find 1,000 customers, which is more like a needle in a haystack. The campaign setup is much more complex. You have to deploy custom bidding strategies because you're a media buyer in a big agency. Whereas MNTN, I don't want to say I use that analogy to Robinhood. It doesn't mean we're Robinhood, but we're built for the marketer, not for the media buyer. We made connected TV for everyone else.
It just kind of keeps us in two separate lanes.
Thank you, Mark. What are you expecting to grow? What kind of revenue rate growth over the next three years?
I think we're not providing, we won't provide 2026 guidance until Q4 results. I mean, I think you can see our growth over the last years, and I don't see anything negatively impacting the company right now.
Okay. Thanks.
Sure.
What else? All right. As a newer public company, you're obviously placed like this. You're talking to a lot of investors. What part of the company or even the market or your opportunity do you think is the most misunderstood when you get into a meeting?
It's an interesting question. A meeting with investors.
When you're meeting with an investor, what do you think is most often the question you get that you're like, "I wish I didn't have to answer that. I wish people knew that already." What do you think is the biggest misconception about MNTN?
Yeah. I think you asked it, which is like, how is this different than and then insert name of company. I think the easiest way that has made everyone understand that difference, honestly, is 97% of our customers have never advertised on TV before. I do not think there is another company in this industry where that metric is even 10%. With that, those metrics being that vastly different, there must be something very different about the products, the go-to-market motion, the strategy, and things like that. I think that is what I hear a lot of people do really key in on is like, "Wow, that metric is shockingly different from the rest of the CTV industry.
Yeah. It's been fascinating to see CTV evolve because I think, especially since cord cutting and COVID, we've all been waiting for those forecasts, this giant linear budget to just plop into CTV. It turns out, kind of what we were saying before, these giant brands who do not need a lot of targeting, linear works pretty well for them.
Yeah. I mean, there is a lot of movement, but I think obviously, if you're in that what we'll call the brand side of the business, you're moving over very large budgets. You can create a lot of early growth, but that'll start to plateau. Meanwhile, the small and mid-sized customers are just like growing and growing and growing for a long time. It's the, and I think you're seeing that continued scale in our business.
Yeah. No, it's always that idea of you watch the Super Bowl, there's maybe 10, 15 different advertisers.
You know, the most interesting commercial in the Super Bowl, I think, is Puppy. And it was this ad from a Soter Youngster.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It had a lot of social media influencers. I referred to it as the ad that didn't just sell the product, it sold the company because they got bought, they got acquired two months later.
I thought maybe you were going to talk about the bouncing QR code from two years ago, the first entrance into CTV performance.
It just shows, I think that was like that ad was from an, is a typical, I think Puppy is a MNTN customer, is a typical, like here's an SMB, they decided to do the big brand moment. It also showed that any size business can now be on connected TV.
Yeah. This was super fun and really exciting opportunity. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you. Appreciate it.