Thank you very much. All right, welcome everybody. I'm just gonna quickly start with the disclosures. For important research disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your MS sales representative. With that out of the way, my name is Matt Cost from Morgan Stanley US Internet team. Very happy to be joined today by Mark Douglas, CEO of MNTN. Thanks for being here.
Thank you.
Awesome. Maybe we can jump right into it maybe as a, as a high level. For people in the audience who may be newer to the MNTN story, talk to us a little bit about an overview of MNTN, where you fit into the advertising ecosystem, and how the business has changed over the past couple of years.
Sure. At MNTN, with the advent of streaming television, relatively early in that journey from linear TV to streaming, we recognized that that was a digital marketing opportunity, and we created the world's first Performance TV platform, and the idea of using, television as a direct response marketing vehicle similar to what companies do with paid search and paid social. We did that, specifically for the SMB market, small and mid-sized businesses, who the majority of spend was on search and social, and now for the first time could really come into the television ecosystem and drive measurable results from streaming TV.
Got it. I guess, you know, talking about the ad market for a minute, you've talked about and alluded to it in your comments just now, 92% of your customers are SMBs. Obviously, it's a volatile ad market out there. Given your exposure to that SMB market, are there any macro trends that you'd call out that are impacting them right now? It's a question that we get all the time about your business.
Yeah. I think the opportunity we're pursuing which Performance Television, that's a TAM we've essentially created.
Mm-hmm.
It's not really, I think, subject to macro trends just because the scale of the opportunity is significant, and I think that that arena tends to have emerging companies who are almost by definition bucking the macro trends. We don't really see macro as a strong as, you know, significant factors, just significantly like we're creating our own TAM. We can grow into that. We see, yeah, we've had consistent growth, and we see that as a continuing opportunity.
Got it. Just following up on that, I guess thinking back a little less than a year ago when all the tariffs hit, I guess in light of your comments, did that impact your customers, their ability, willingness to spend?
No. I mean, we definitely heard from our customers, some of them, but I think only one of them paused spend because, again, when you're an emerging brand, you don't no matter what the factors you're facing, you're not really giving up your growth aspirations. You might give up some of the margin you're taking. You might, you'll find a path. That was a really good example of that not occurring. I think I've seen charts in the past that showed to some extent, Performance Television being almost not Performance Television, being performance marketing, being almost like recession-proof and, you know, like because the number of e-commerce companies and travel brands and other brands that are active in the space. Matt, again, it's a reiteration of kind of macro not really being a key factor.
It's more the scale of the opportunity that we're growing into is the key factor.
Let's stick with Performance TV, kind of really what you were alluding to there. I mean, the fact that you're bringing performance advertising to streaming TV is really.
Yeah.
the main differentiator of your platform. Talk to us about some of the technology that you're leveraging there to make that possible. You know, MNTN Matched, just one example of something that, you know, comes to mind there. How are you iterating on your offering to grow how much you can scale on Performance TV going forward?
Yeah. I think the comparison is, there are really two ad markets. There's a brand ad market, which is represented, I think, but has represented past a lot of the television ecosystem. There's a Performance market, which is kind of the segment that we're growing into. They're very, very different. I'll give you a very simple example. Look at two very different types of customers. Let's say you have a customer like a Verizon. Virtually everyone in America can be a Verizon customer. The technology needs there are very different. You don't have the targeting needs. You don't have the measurement needs. It's more about them building the Verizon brand, that brand being top of mind if it's time for you to potentially you want to switch carriers.
Look at an example, one of my favorite customers, Onewheel. They sell a single-wheel skateboard, very extreme sports. You probably see people in San Francisco or New York. It looks fun, but it also looks very dangerous, right? Not everyone's a customer for that. They are not trying to get 100 million customers. They're trying to get their next 10,000. We have to apply AI models to the targeting, generative models to profile who their target consumer is, machine learning models to find them. Everything has to be much more precise. The budgets are smaller. Verizon probably spends, you know, I think they're the 3rd-largest television advertising in the United States, so that means they're spending something like $35 million a month on TV advertising. Someone like Onewheel is gonna be spending, you know, far lower than that.
Every ad has to hit the right consumer, and that has to be measured. They have to A/B test the creative. You know, everything is done with a deeper level of technology. MNTN services all those technology needs end to end, purpose-built for the SMB market and purpose-built so you can take those dollars, and you can use them very, very efficiently so each of our customers can find them their next customer. The purpose of that example was to show how different that is from, like, a big global or enterprise brand. The technology that the targeting, the measurement, the campaign management, the creative tools, because they'll have TV ads when we meet them, so that's why we have QuickFrame for creative.
That's all, like, a part of the whole package we deliver into the market for Performance TV.
Got it. Let's stick with creative for a second. You know, obviously it's not generating a significant amount of revenue, but you just alluded there to how important it is for the customer experience.
Yeah.
-and for retention of your advertisers. Talk about the innovations you're making there, QuickFrame AI and, you know, a little bit about customer adoption and how important the creative tools are.
Yeah. We see it as a revenue enabler, not specifically the revenue from QuickFrame, but how it enables customers to get live on our platform faster and also have more creative. Meaning if you lower the cost and lower the time to have it, then you can have more of it. The more you're thinking about how to communicate your value to consumers, the more likely and trying different ideas, the more likely you're finding the you know, kind of the messaging and the creatives that really hit home for that consumer. That's why we built QuickFrame. Is we wanted to have a solution that was really specifically built for TV 30-second ads. Which means it has to be generated in multiple scenes, consistent characters across the scenes. We've been very happy with the adoption.
We've announced early on, right out the gate, we had over 5,000 users. The number is greater now. It's still in beta. We're doing a series of product releases that we think just really nail the fit from our customers. We're actually getting a lot of feedback from our own use of it. MNTN now, our own commercials are largely we're using our own tools to build our commercials, and we're getting a good response, like marketing response to them. It's a really key component. The netted out is, more than 95% of our customers have never advertised on TV before, which means more than 95% don't have a TV ad when we meet them, and they certainly don't have many TV ads. That's QuickFrame solves that problem.
Mm-hmm.
It allows them to get that creative at a lower cost faster and do it and build creative more often.
Got it.
Yeah.
You gave that really helpful example just a minute ago about Verizon versus Onewheel and sort of the differences in the needs of those enterprise versus.
Yeah.
SMB-type customers. I guess, talk to us about the key differences in terms of approaching and onboarding those customers? You know, time to first campaign, retention. How do you ensure that you're profitable when you're going after these smaller, advertisers?
Yeah. I mean, I think the profitability I'll start with there is just having discipline in terms of customer acquisition costs and so forth. You can see that in our numbers. We've been able to do that pretty consistently, profitably pretty consistently, for many, many quarters. The adjusted EBITDA, unadjusted EBITDA base and now EBITDA bases. Go back to the original question again.
just the difference between onboarding, time to first campaign, the process of.
Yeah. If that relates very specifically to the previous question. The majority of the time it takes for a customer to go live is waiting on creative.
Mm.
Especially in the mid-market, where not only do you have to build creative for TV, you also need approval, like people. It might be a bigger marketing team, there are people that need to approve and so forth. One of the other reasons when I mention QuickFrame, I keep mentioning fast. It's not only fast for them, it's fast for us. If they get creative faster, that means they go live faster, and that's something that we, you know, we wanna see happen, and honestly, they wanna see happen. When they're new to TV, they're excited about it, they wanna get live. There's a lot of momentum there, that's the key thing.
The Go-live time, typical on our platform's literally it approaches 90% of the time it's just waiting for creative. That's the number we've been attacking, and we're really happy with how that's progressing right now.
You talked, you know, in passing a moment ago about using your own platform as a means of-.
Yeah.
acquiring, users. Talk to us more about how that fits into your marketing and user acquisition strategy and, your plan to use that going forward. Is that a growing part of your marketing mix? How important is it?
Yeah. We use a number of different channels to, in order to acquire customers. Our own platform is the leading source of new customers for MNTN, meaning we run MNTN TV commercials on streaming TV. Essentially, the ads are not like billboards or anything, but it's like you ever see a billboard that says, "You could advertise here." It's somewhat. The ads don't say anything like that, but that's kind of the message, right? You, SMB customer, could be here on Housewives, on Landman, on my favorite show last week, which was Traders, the favorite reality show. That's the mix. We also use social, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok and other vehicles to acquire customers.
That mix allows us to do that with a pretty stable customer acquisition cost, and that fits into the economics of the business.
I guess thinking of it as a, you know, driver of your own marketing mix, I mean, what are the unique aspects of using your own platform to acquire users? How are you able to reach people differently?
Yeah. Well, the nice thing is, the thing about streaming TV, about television advertising, it's like against the literal best content in the world. Like, when people go out to dinner, they don't talk, I mean, they don't talk about like the YouTube video they were listening on the way to, on the way to dinner. They talk about the season finale of The Traitors or The White Lotus. Like, they're talking about the first episode of The White Lotus. They're talking about the best content in the world. The other thing on streaming TV, the ad space you get against content like that is 30 seconds uninterrupted. It's like a real opportunity to tell your story. As a result of that combined with all the tech, it performs really, really well.
I think for all our customers, they're doing the same mix. They're using social, search. The opportunity to now make a big platform like television the largest screen in the home. There's generally no larger screen in a home than the television. They get 30 seconds of time uninterrupted again, against that, against the best content in the world is a really, I think, important part of marketing mix, and more and more SMB customers are recognizing.
Got it. I guess thinking about your expectations for 2026, I believe you guided to another year of 20%+ revenue growth. What are some of the key growth levers that you're looking at that are kind of underpinning that expectation? Just broadly, what is driving that strength in the business?
Yeah. Well, I think one is honestly is AI. Then, I don't know, maybe that sounds like a coin response. It's not. All the targeting I mentioned is enabled through AI models.
Mm-hmm.
Like, we used to ask our customers who their consumer is, now we tell them.
Mm.
who their consumer is, and then they agree or adjust or things like that. We literally use machine learning model. I'm sorry, we use generative AI to literally say, "What does this company sell? What products do they have? What other things would someone who bought this, what else would they be interested in?" With that really precise consumer profile, then we use that in order to essentially run machine learning models in order to find that consumer. The AI models we talked about in the creative, the more creative you have, the better performance you're gonna get. I mean, it plays an important role also, data and the creative. We have AI media planning right now that we have in beta. What that does is it really again, does the same thing.
That looks at predicts the context of the content that this, these products and this brand will perform against and tells that to the customer so they can see what the game plan is in terms of the execution of the campaign. That's basically the number one driver, is technology, in particular those levels of technology, and then also just our continued, you know, sales and marketing expansion is also, with any growing business, is an important component also.
Got it.
Yeah.
Let's talk for a second about competition. I think you mentioned right at the top that, you know, you're kind of building this market as you go.
Yeah.
You know, you're changing advertiser behavior away from things, maybe not away, but in addition to stalwart performance channels like search and social. I guess, how do you see the Performance TV competitive landscape changing over the next 2 years? What aspects of your platform, your go-to-market and your customer experience do you think, you know, create a moat around MNTN?
Yeah. Well, I think the TAM for the segment will keep growing. That's an important component of what we're doing. In terms of the TAM, it's a whole set of Excuse me. Do we have a water in the room or something like that?
I think there's some in the back, yeah.
Thank you. I appreciate it. Umi, thank you so much. Sorry.
All right.
Again.
Gotcha.
I couldn't drop that.
Actually would have made a good sizzle reel, though.
There you go. I think, one, the TAM here can continue to expand. That's really important. The nice thing is, again, we're contributing to the creation of the TAM because we enable the idea that the SMB market could do performance marketing there. That's the... Remind me of the question again. I wanna make sure I nail it.
We're talking about the competitive landscape.
Yeah. In terms of competitive landscape, the, as TAM grows, there's bound to be competition to show up. The old saying is, if you don't have competition, you don't have a market, right? I think competitively, in terms of our defensible position, the performance tech I've mentioned, we have a big head start on that. It is really hard to catch up. The things that maybe a potential competitor wants to do that we've already done and built in platform, we're already doing additional things that I'm not talking about, you know, because I, honestly, I don't want competitors to know about. We're continuing to invest in that.
Our relationships with the networks, you know, we're, we are the number one player in Performance TV, and so we have deep relationships with the networks right now around that, you know, the pricing that reflects that also contributes to our performance. Our Go-To-Market Motion, I think, is another really important point. Like, we've been going to market here for a bit and really learn how to bring companies in, get them through a sales cycle, get them through a go live cycle, and have them be successful. All of those play a role. Like, if they, if you bring them in efficiently, but they don't see the performance, they. They can't get the creative.
Everything you've heard me talk about in terms of platform is kind of a direct response to having a competitive, like a big moat that also works efficiently to bring on customers and grow the business.
I think something that's probably a really, not really, but somewhat poorly understood, differentiator of what you do is the relationships with the networks that you just mentioned.
Yeah.
I guess maybe spend a second on the supply side and what you're doing with them and sort of the win-win that you have with them that others would have a hard time maybe replicating?
Right. I think the streaming networks view us as a growth channel because we're bringing a cohort of customers in the market that they previously didn't really have good access to. They might have had some smaller customers in the local market, but definitely not e-commerce, right? Definitely not travel. Online, you know, kind of, kind of highly targeted, highly measured. That just I mean, it was rare to see, even It was literally rare to see, like, kind of a true emerging e-commerce brand leveraging TV, and the reasons were the targeting, the data, the measurement, the integration with Google Analytics and all the different measurement platforms and stuff like that. As a nature of we're a growth channel, we have really collaborative relationships with all the streaming networks, and I think they see us in a different bucket.
One thing we constantly, every time we're having meetings with any of the networks is more than 95% of our customers have never advertised on TV before and weren't going to if not enabled by a platform like MNTN. It's created really, really key relationships. Also, our relationships with the networks are 1-to-1, meaning that we have direct partnerships, negotiated what's called private marketplace deals, which I think are really critical to having the relationship and the pricing that makes this, you know, work well for everyone.
Got it. You mentioned travel and e-commerce is important vehicle, excuse me, verticals. Do you have outsized exposure to any particular verticals? How does seasonality and vertical specific events impact the predictability of your business?
Not really. I mean, a really good example that this is going back to, like, 2020, a year that I think everyone wants to forget. Like, 23% of our revenue came from travel that went to zero in one week, and we had a great year.
Mm-hmm.
As long as we're continuing to grow and so forth, I don't think there's any revenue concentration or vertical exposure that we feel concerned about.
Hmm. That's interesting. I mean, I guess 2020 is sort of an unusual example. What did happen that year? You're talking about bringing in groups of advertisers who've never done this before. If some of them went dark because of the situation at that point in time, who replaced them?
Well, it's honestly relates back to one of the earlier questions you asked, which is about macro, is that in challenging times, emerging companies, SMB companies, growing companies. They don't give up their aspiration for growth. When they find enough. They find. This happened earlier this year with tariffs, or earlier last year, with tariffs and things like that. When one segment goes out of favor, there's always winners and losers is maybe the way to say it.
Mm-hmm.
If one sector is facing some really big headwinds through factors out of their control, that generally means someone else is actually growing as a result of that. Overall, I think the performance advertising space in general tends to be, you know, kind of relatively immune from, like, individual factors because it's just so broad and there's so many different companies. No player in this market is really highly dependent on one. That was particularly challenging, obviously. Yeah, there were a lot of other companies that were like, "I'm not giving up my growth aspirations. I'm doubling down.
Mm-hmm.
They did.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I guess, you know, your expectation would be that, you know, given the scale of performance advertising at this point, it is kind of this always-on spend for a lot of companies.
Yeah.
Your expectation would be, it sounds like, that even as things, you know, might get more turbulent in the future, if they were to, you'd expect there to be offsetting, you know, factors between different verticals.
Yeah. I have yet to see in the performance space, I don't mean just MNTN, I mean across the entire space, where there's something that, like, that really interferes with the market to grow. Remember, growth in the performance advertising space is somewhat indexed to growth of your customers.
Mm-hmm.
I think there tends to be a focus on CPMs in the brand advertising arena because it's viewed more as a cost, but in a performance space, it's viewed more as a revenue enabler.
Hmm.
As companies grow, they tend to grow their marketing spend along with that, any company that's providing measurable benefits that spend is going to tend to grow with them.
Got it. Let's talk for a second about agencies. I think you've called out on a couple of recent earnings calls that you've seen some growth with performance agencies, ones that were maybe more focused on search and social historically. Seems like an important proof point, frankly.
Yeah.
for getting mind share with advertisers. How important is that as a source of new growth? How does it interact with your traditional ways of reaching advertisers?
Well, In the overall performance marketing space, agencies are probably about 10% of the overall revenue. They are early adopters, right?
Mm-hmm.
They also are force multiplier. One agency can bring many clients. What we're seeing is that the agencies start to recognize this as a growth opportunity for them. We're, we're out meeting with a lot of them, signing them up as customers, giving them the support in order to grow Performance TV as a component of their business. It's an opportunity like I'm particularly excited about. In terms of the overall business, it's still likely to be less than 10%-20% even over time. That's where it typically lands because most performance advertisers prefer to run in-house. When your goal is measurable revenue, you don't have a strong tendency to outsource that unless you really feel the need to get assistance.
Got it.
Yeah.
One thing that we get asked about all the time as it relates to online advertising is how consumer behavior might change going forward.
Yeah.
Frankly, streaming TV is probably one of the least frequent areas that comes up as something that might be at risk.
Yeah.
In fact, it's something that people highlight as like, well, this will be kind of like a safe port in the storm. People are gonna still be watching, you know, Breaking Bad or whatever it is, you know, The Traitors, the show of the day. I guess when you think about how you expect attention to change, do you see opportunities? Do you see risks, you know, and how do you think MNTN fits into that changing ecosystem?
I mean, I think the underlying source of the change is AI and the agentic AI and other things. We see AI as enabler for the business. We don't think... I think one thing that's important to understand is, even within Performance advertising, there are things that you're going to buy where you know you need it...
Mm-hmm
you tend to use search for those things, right? There are things you buy that you didn't know you needed, right? You tend to discover those things on TV, on social, like the... I see many things like on TV ads or on Instagram where I'm like, "I didn't know I needed this, but I need it." "Like, I want it." The behavior in them is very different. On TV, people love to be entertained, and shopping itself is a form of entertainment for many people.
I think that's why you know, you can logically think, "Oh, this thing is somewhat like this is where people are gonna go for entertainment." I don't think we're gonna see a mass abandonment of shopping.
Mm-hmm.
Now, shopping for Bounty paper towels, you might like say, "I'm not manually doing that anymore if like agentic AI can do that for me." That's really a competitor to search.
Mm-hmm.
The Amazon search or a Google search. The other thing I'll say is I'd never in the history of performance advertising see a rising tide not lift all boats.
Mm.
If the companies who are benefiting from new ways of acquiring consumers, they tend to then they don't wanna become dependent on any one source of revenue.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Again, some of their customers might come from discovery, some might come from the person, word of mouth, and they're just doing a search to find it or whatever it is. I guess to finish trying to answer your question, Yeah, I kind of agree. I think the introduction of AI marketing or agentic or things like that, I think overall that's gonna be beneficial to everyone. I think in particular on TV, the thing to leave behind is this is a channel where people discover new things.
Mm.
That's an activity I don't think that people wanna outsource to AI.
Right. It sounds like from the, you know, just the way you went through that, it sounds like from a roadmap perspective, everything you're thinking about doing still is in the streaming TV world. There's not other services that are interesting or that you're focused on.
Yeah. I mean, we're definitely exploring some very closely related areas, but for the most part, it's video, on large devices.
Yep. Yep. Fair enough. Maybe let's talk about kind of the headcount and OpEx footprint. I think half your headcount is engineers.
Yeah.
You're, you know, continuously investing in a lot of AI development stuff that you've been talking-
Yeah
about in this conversation. How do you think about the trade-off between investing in AI now versus versus profitability? How do you measure the ROI on the bets that you're making?
I mean, I think the market or the use of AI is already divided into those who build the models and those who leverage those models to create additional value. That could be a lot of value or, you know, it depends on what it is. For us, it's largely around targeting and creative, although we're using AI both in our business as well as in like media planning. We're using AI models across all of those. The cost of that is actually very manageable.
Mm.
We're not one of the company where the cost of that is working with Google through GCP and Gemini or working with many models. I don't see a conflict. The kind of benefit we're getting definitely exceeds the cost. We're not fighting this battle. Now, if we were, you know, training our own models rather than leveraging the best models out there, that might be a different scenario. It's also smart because the best models out there feels like it changes every month.
Right.
We're pretty agnostic to it.
Yep. I guess, how do you think about that dividing line between renting versus building technology, 'cause there's a lot of important proprietary tools that you have built at MNTN.
Yes.
I guess, how do you locate that line and think about it?
It's sometimes hard. I mean, you look at QuickFrame AI. We chose to build that. I mean, we're using models for the actual generation, but we chose to build the entire environment because that the best models are rapidly changing, so we're not dependent on any one model. As a matter of fact, in a 30-second commercial, it generates into multiple scenes, and each scene can be a different AI model. And the technology to do that, to go across multiple models with consistent characters, that, the orchestration of that is actually pretty complex. That's where we add value in order to pick the models. If you're doing a product commercial, it tends to go this way. If you're doing talking characters, these models tend to be used.
We chose something that's that important to our business, that's something we wanna directly invest in, like the orchestration layer, the environment, everything. In something that's a little less important, we might make a different choice. In all cases, we are the area we are essentially generating our own models is on the targeting side. 'Cause there are no models to do targeting, and we think we can really differentiate there. There's specific choices, and even there, the cost is manageable. We're not running LLM models across the entire internet. We're running it against a large but very specific data set that's far smaller than the entire internet. I think the original part of your question was the cost. It's a very manageable cost, especially relative to the benefit you get.
Got it.
Yeah.
Maybe we can close just on really zooming out. We've talked a lot about AI opportunities. I guess when you think about the single most underappreciated opportunity from AI at MNTN, and then maybe, you know, a challenge that you think is worth highlighting that you think you're in a good position to execute through.
Yeah. I mean, in terms of underappreciated, after this talk, maybe it's not 'Cause I've said targeting or what I like to call it matching, 'cause the targeting sounds like you're sharpshooting someone. The matching is I always view our business as we are matching consumers with brands and products they're potentially gonna love. The TV commercial is the means to make that match. It is absolutely the biggest opportunity where we've already seen a lot of benefit and continue to see the benefit. Same with the creative. It comes up a lot. It's because, I mean, even in our own business, the number of commercials we're making for us has gone up substantially since we started the using AI.
If you see a commercial from MNTN and it doesn't have Ryan Reynolds in it is AI-generated. If Ryan wasn't in SAG, maybe that would be AI-generated also. That's just been important. We can put out so much more content. The thing about, I think in this market, it's almost consumer-level marketing, even though we're a B2B company. The first rule of consumer-level marketing is you can never predict the behavior of the consumer. It's really good to always have a lot of different messaging and trying out and see what resonates and see what people respond to. I think it's a reiteration of what we've talked about in terms of targeting, creative, and so forth.
In terms of the biggest challenge, I honestly, the, you know, we've established a market. It's really like, is making sure that we remain like the market we created, that we, you know, maintain that competitive mode and add to it. We, you know, we are the biggest winner in the market we created, which is Performance TV. That term is now a fairly broadly used term in the industry. That did not exist on the internet when we first, the first time we put Performance TV on our website.
That's a great point to close on.
Yeah.
Mark, thank you so much.
Thank you.