Mike. Okay, we're gonna get started. I'm Laura Martin. I'm the Senior Media and Internet Analyst at Needham & Company. I'm gonna introduce Mark Douglas, our next speaker. Mark is the Founder and CEO of MNTN, where he has spent over a decade transforming connected TV into measurable performance marketing channel. Mark recently led MNTN's 2025 IPO. A seasoned engineering leader and entrepreneur, he previously served as the VP of Engineering at Magnite, Rubicon Project, and VP of Technology at eHarmony, where he developed the platform's foundational matching algorithm. I wanna start with a question about leadership, and I think most people would agree that generative AI is transformative.
What kind of demands does that put on you as a leader that are different from when maybe times are a little more incremental?
When something is transformative, I think everyone has to decide, is this gonna become an enabler, or is this something I'm excited about, or is this something I'm afraid of? For me personally, I think, one is I like change.
As a matter of fact, I love change. I see AI as completely enabler, something that me personally and the team at MNTN have kinda jumped on very, very early. We're the first to introduce AI targeting, which we call MNTN Matched. We're, I think, one of the first to introduce AI creative tools, because the vast majority of our customers have never advertised on TV before, so we had to enable a way for them to build TV ads. We're putting AI throughout our platform. We're adding MCP, or we just added MCP support, meaning you can.
MCP?
Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, that's how AI platforms talk to each other.
Okay.
That you can have, like, open ChatGPT or have Claude basically. You can use them to tell our software what to do, that's also important. It's all about just basically seeing these changes as opportunities rather than seeing them as a threat, we definitely view it that way.
Okay. Does it put any demands on you as a leader to handhold more or be more visible with the humans in the enterprise 'cause of the fear level?
You mean within the company?
Yeah.
You know, I think a lot of people are viewing AI currently at this moment as something that reduces costs. We're seeing it as something that increases speed.
Okay.
There are potential cost benefits, but you know, technology doesn't come for free. When we articulate, when I articulate to the company and to our customers as we want to enable more faster-
They are a part of that, then, you know, I don't think that drives fear. I think that drives excitement that enables us to be a market leader in adoption of new tech, like Generative AI and other forms of AI.
Okay.
Does it make a difference? You guys don't have any physical plant, right? You guys are all distributed.
Yeah, we have no office.
Right.
We're fully remote.
Does that make your organization more easily adaptable to technological change?
I think it does, mainly because we had to, post-COVID, we never went back to office. We've been fully remote. We've hired many, many people you know, kinda who are fully remote. It drives a discipline in the business in terms of setting clear goals, measuring the effectiveness of that. We don't manage people based on time. We manage based on goals and results. I think just the nature of the company's DNA is one of doing things differently, again, enables I don't have conversations in the company at all about people, like, viewing AI as fear. I have it as, if anything, what they want us to, and they want us to see around corners.
How do we enable, again, rather than, you know, kind of be threatened by that?
Okay. Okay.
I'm completely excited about all the technological change that's occurring, and we're born, and I'm rolling in.
Right. You and Reddit are both 100%, I'm going to call it virtual, where you don't have actually a head office, and I'm just wondering if that affects the adaptability to generative AI. Your point, which is well-taken, is if you're already 100% distributed, you must have clear goals and deliverables.
Otherwise, how do you tell if somebody's pulling their weight?
Exactly.
That discipline from not having an office and not just being in office means people have to be more substantive.
Yeah. We also Like, I was talking to our head of engineering literally last week, and we were talking about adoption of AI coding and, like, the various ways it's being used and what are the right ways and what ways don't make sense. I don't think the being fully remote is playing much of a role. It's much more about is the leadership of the company leaned in to are they tech-savvy? Even if it's a tech company, it doesn't mean you always have tech-savvy leadership.
Are they tech-savvy, and are they leaned in? Are they curious, and are they actually looking not just for adoption to say it's adopted but, you know, to produce material benefits? In our engineering organization, we are definitely like, "What is the right way to do AI coding, to use AI tools, to make sure we have maintainable code and things like that?" Same thing happening in our sales organization. We leverage AI as part of our go-to-market motion, but we obviously don't want people to feel like they're talking to a computer when if that's not the conversation they wanna have.
You have to leverage it very smartly, and that, those are conversations me, my COO, my Head of Engineering, my Head of Sales are having regularly.
Okay. One of the unique things about your strategic position is that increasingly, in CTV, advertisers wanna tie their Connected TV purchase to performance. You guys really embedded the market in this in Performance CTV. What's changing in 2026, and is that good for you or bad for your economics?
The literal concept of performance, the term Performance CTV was created by MNTN. We deliberately did not trademark it because we wanted it. The whole idea when we launched MNTN Performance TV, I said to the team, "The easiest way to win a market is to create that market. We're gonna create the market for performance television." That's what we did. We anticipated that if we're successful in that, it will eventually be. It's not just MNTN, it's bigger than MNTN. Now that we see other companies using that term, number one, that's a validator that the, of the scale of the opportunity here.
the TAM. Number two, you know, puts more customers in the market who it kinda starts to move the market from early adopter phase, where we're evangelizing to more mainstream where companies, especially SMB companies believe they can be there. For MNTN, we are purpose-built for the SMB portion of this opportunity.
I think, you know, the other companies may potentially be looking at performance should be a part of the enterprise brands. That's not a area we play in. We feel that SMB has unique needs, unique go-to-market motion, unique knowledge and talent needed to win there. That's where we're the market leader, where we intend to play, and we feel very secure in all the capabilities we have in our products and also our go-to-market motion around it.
Performance TV done by other people isn't really necessarily SMB targeted, so they're doing something different.
They're more focused on what's happening, I think, when you first brought up the point, is larger brands are also saying, "Hey, we should be measuring the impact of the spend." You know, there's many, many tens of billions of dollars a year, and we agree with that. It's just that segment of the market is not a segment we're pursuing, and I think, some of the bigger enterprise companies in the TV space find it very difficult to come into the market segment that we're in.
Yeah, that makes sense. One of the things that happened in the most recent quarter is your revenue slowed, your guidance is for slowing revenue. Are we running up against the TAM in SMBs, do you think?
No. I think what we basically have a lot, as this, the opportunity moves from a early adopter to mainstream, we are basically enhancing a lot of things in the business. We added Garland Hill, who's the former head of growth at TikTok and now MNTN CRO. He built TikTok's SMB revenue literally from zero, he was the first person, to $ billions in revenue. We have a lot of product initiatives rolling out. We just thought it was prudent to, with so many things happening at the same time, we just wanted to be very prudent in our guidance and that's what we did. We're not seeing any long-term revenue slowing, certainly not any capping of the TAM or anything like that.
Okay, 'cause you wouldn't think hiring a big, huge executive from TikTok would slow your revenue growth. That to me, that's the opposite. If you hire a big guy, you'd think he'd accelerate revenue growth.
Right
the wrong-
Which is why we guided higher.
in the second half of the year.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right. We think he has impact on the second half of the year.
Yeah.
Okay, cool. all right. It feels like, I do have a lot of competitors like Viant, saying they're gonna target the SMB. They're doing self-service, they're adding it to their core DSP, and they're trying to come down into your market. Do you just think they won't be successful 'cause they weren't purpose-built for SMBs and it's a harder like hurdle than they're assuming?
I think there's a couple things. One, easier said than done. You actually have to build the technology and succeed in doing so.
The go-to-market motion is very difficult. Most of all, we actually are not just the market leader in terms of the idea of Performance TV, we are the market leader in terms of the actual performance.
That is many, many years of investment in performance technology, plus now two plus years of investment in AI technology around performance.
And we're not standing still. More than half of MNTN is engineering, so we have a big investment in technology.
Yeah.
We, I honestly think not everyone is gonna succeed in that effort.
No.
The ones that do, there's more than just having a self-serve platform.
actually have to deliver performance on the level with paid search and paid social, but do so for television, and that's what MNTN has done for many years now, and we're continuing to grow in terms of performance.
One of the things we're seeing is where these people decide to go into your business, they're hiring separate sales forces 'cause they can't get their normal sales force.
that calls on big clients to call on SMBs.
Yeah.
How do you do that? Like, do you guys have salesmen or is it mostly, like, you're mostly using programmatic advertising to get your clients?
It's a combination we have lead gen using our own product-.
Right
as well as using social and other LinkedIn, other channels. As well as we have, yes, a very efficient go-to-market motion on the sales side. For the midsize customers, there's a bit more selling involved because there are more decision makers involved.
Yeah.
For the much smaller businesses, it's much more marketing driven.
Again, that didn't happen overnight. We had to build that out. We had to learn how to do it. We had to grow it. Once you do all that, now you have someone who's like, "Yeah, this sounds exciting. I'd like to try it," and then, and then you actually have to deliver the goods.
Which is you help them grow their business.
Right, right.
Not just you grow your own.
Right, right.
Yeah.
They don't renew, I assume, if you don't help sales lift.
Renew is spend tomorrow. There are no contracts in performance marketing. Like, there's no one has signed a contract to run ads on Google Ads.
Right.
it's not like next week. It's like, "I spent money today. Do I see the sale tomorrow?
Yeah, I mean. They generally wanna see results within the length of their sales cycle. They, like one of our customers is HexClad, and you know, their sales cycle is people look at the pans and then they look, go shopping someplace else, and they get interrupted by their kids. You know, it takes more than sometimes a few days to commit.
Within a reasonable sales cycle. Most sales cycles we see for e-commerce for multi-100 dollar price points are in the range of like, you know, one to three weeks. Yeah. They're judging within those kind of time horizons, not literally a day.
Overnight.
Yeah, but they're not like, "I'll wait till next year when the contract renews," 'cause there is no contract.
Right
at all in performance marketing.
Right, right.
No, Meta doesn't sign contracts.
Google does, neither does MNTN.
Yeah. Okay. Are they have an always on all year? Are you bringing an ad campaign or do you have an always on kind of idea?
Yeah, it's always on. We call that evergreen.
That's a pretty common term in performance marketing.
These are evergreen campaigns.
If they have a very seasonal business.
Like Christmas or Mother's Day or something.
Exactly.
We had customer that, or have a customer that does, like, pool stuff, so they don't sell that. Pool supplies. That said stuff. They, so they shut down in the middle of the winter. They're not doing much marketing. For the most part, most of our customers are evergreen. Budgets change throughout the year based on seasonality.
If they're doing a new product launch, there might be, you know.
extra. For the most part, performance marketing is evergreen marketing.
I remember a big client of yours early on was Purple Mattress, wasn't it? 'Cause that was a performative.
Yeah.
Then what happened? Did they Like, what happened to that?
I think they haven't over the long term.
Yeah
done well, but we have a number of other mattress brands. We somehow in the early days became big in the mattress sector.
Okay. You've kept a lot of those guys.
We kept a lot of them. Yeah, we're pretty happy with that.
Yeah. Well, I just bought a new mattress. It wasn't Purple, but it comes all bundled up. It's like size of those stack of papers, and then it opens up into a queen-sized mattress o ver 72 hours.
I know. It's crazy.
It's crazy.
It's pretty insane.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We actually just picked up a pretty well-known mattress brand, so continues to be a strength of the business.
Yeah. Very interesting. I guess like YouTube, you don't really care which mattress brand works as long as they're doing lead gen through you guys.
Well, I mean, ultimately, but I mean, I do. I tell our team all the time because the I feel like as a company, we don't sell ads. What we do is we connect consumers with brands and products they're gonna potentially love.
Like a lead gen kind of commerce thing?
Yeah, I mean, when you take it down to marketing terms, it's lead gen. It's like there for every brand, there's someone who's excited about the products they build, and what we do is we connect them with consumers through 30 seconds of uninterrupted video on the biggest screen in the home. That hopefully leads to a lot of leads and a lot of purchases, everyone's happy. The brand is happy. The consumer's happy. You know, you got a new mattress.
You hopefully, you're happy with it. Exactly. Everyone's happy. I think sometimes people forget that television's such an amazing storytelling medium. For us to connect brands to that medium, we're literally telling the story into nearly every household in America, and helping those businesses grow. I say this as just like, it's kind of an emotional underpinning of what we do as a business, is connecting brands with consumers that are potentially gonna, you know, hopefully love those products. That's kinda how I describe what we do inside our platform.
One of your competitive advantages has been this sort of unique access you have to Connected TV ad units.
Yeah.
Why don't you walk the audience through on, like, how you get this unique CTV ad inventory?
Yeah. Consumers, meaning are watching TV everywhere. I think one thing that sometimes people forget, the number one consumed entertainment medium is not social media, it's television. 5.1 billion people a day watch television worldwide on average three hours a day. 4.1 billion use social media. The content that people talk about, there are funny memes out there on social, but the big conversation piece over dinner is often.
what shows are you watching? What season finale did you see? Or did you see this? It's just a very powerful medium that small business were cut off from. We connected that. We went to every streaming network in America, all of them. Apple TV doesn't have ads, and we, you know, when we first launched this platform, and we built direct relationships to access their inventory programmatically. Meaning, we have a programmatic technology stack that targets the consumer, bids for each campaign that's running, bids on that inventory. If that person in that audience is watching Disney, or they're watching Landman on Paramount, or they're watching Warner Bros., any network or a FAST channel, we are able to access that inventory, bid on it for a specific campaign.
We win that auction, then we stream a 30-second TV commercial into the home during a commercial break, then we measure the results of that. All of that's provided in our platform, including the ability to create the ads through AI technology now.
Okay. You don't see the end of any of those contracts coming? Because that is a big competitive advantage is unique content.
No, no, not at all. I mean, I think that we are considered by most of our media network partners as a growth channel. I think the key stat is, more than 95% of MNTN customers-Have never advertised on TV before, this is net new customers, revenue it brought into the industry. We're a growth channel. We're not competing with them at all. We're not competing with their sales teams. We are literally just bringing new companies into the television ecosystem. We were talking earlier, they're recognizing at how important SMB is, and they see us as we kind of created that segment of the market.
A lot of those providers that have very high quality video are very sort of crazy about the quality of the ad.
Yeah.
Some of these SMB ads you see now, like on Fox News or something, are pretty sort of like, low quality.
Yeah
is what I would call it, especially if they're performance driven, right? How do you keep the quality standards up so that you don't get kicked off one of these very high-end content suppliers?
Well, ironically, we actually use AI technology to review the ads. It used to be entirely human, now it's predominantly AI, and the AI will technology reviews. Flag it for a human review. They do get reviewed. There are technology standards both automatically enforced, meaning it has to be a 30-second TV commercial down to the frame. Like, you can't even have a single frame missing.
That's automatically maintained. Also, it's just bringing down the cost of creative, so they can build better quality creative, but do so at a lower cost. That's the key thing. The brands want high quality, professional level creative. That's why we've invested in building QuickFrame AI.
We consider it part of our mission, is that they can produce a lot, each brand can produce a lot of creative at very reasonable costs, and it's creative they would be proud to show their customers, their friends, their family and so forth.
On a 65-inch screen.
On a 65-inch screen.
Which is not for giving.
The AI models were QuickFrame, which is the technology that provides that, is orchestrating multiple models across CDance, Kling, the Veo, and orchestrating these in the scenes to produce really good video. Our generation times are 15 minutes to generate 30 seconds.
This is a lot of steps that are happening to generate higher quality video.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay. What happens, you had an old, I'm gonna call it a consulting network that was called QuickFrame.
Yeah.
Is that, is this QuickFrame AI sort of cannibalizing that? Are you bringing new money into the ecosystem?
Yeah. There's some of those. QuickFrame started out as a marketplace of independent creators.
Right, that's what it was.
We were kind of like Uber for that marketplace.
Yeah.
Like, we would connect the creators with.
With the brands who needed the video
with the brands. now for the Even when you bring down the costs.
Yeah
people are very busy. Even though it's easy, they're very busy. Some of the brands now use those creators to do AI video for them.
Okay.
Our own marketing team does that ironically.
Okay.
Like, we've been putting out quite a bit of video, and then we, some of that's created in-house, and some of that we use some of the creators to create, and they do it at a very reasonable cost. We increasingly also have been connecting with social media creators.
Oh, interesting.
connecting them with brands using AI tools.
Okay
the whole creative-
To create a 30-second spot.
To create-
not to talk about it on their
Exactly, to create a 30-second spot. What?
Interesting
What you're seeing is that this is an arena where, you know, AI is actually creating more work. Instead of people saying, "Oh, well, it costs a lot less, so I'll do a lot less," they're saying, "No, it costs a lot less, so I'll actually create a lot more ads. I'm very busy, so let me maybe I can find someone to help me with that.
We're creating a new marketplace of creators for QuickFrame AI, as well as some of the existing ones, and it's actually creating a lot of work for people.
If you count, they make five ads, let's say. Let's say they make five ads. Does the software A/B test them? Like, once you make more ads, how does that get used in the MNTN ad tech stuff?
Yeah. You said it exactly. We have full A/B testing capabilities, meaning testing one creative versus many. The more creatives you create, the more you'll test. This is something that's pretty common.
Like, that's been done for many years, like in Instagram's ad platform, and then Google, there's, you know, the creative is tech. It's been done.
Yeah
for many, many years on their platform. It's done on our platform too. By bringing down the cost of creative, it allows a lot more testing. More testing tends to lead towards more even better outcome, even better performance.
Right.
The average user in QuickFrame is creating seven ads, seven projects a month.
Okay.
Like, there was no way they were doing that, you know, like picking up a camera and hand editing video, creating seven separate projects a month. People are definitely seeing it from that kind of data as a way to enable more and more creative and more and more testing.
Then those independent creators come in by being like, they'll do that, they'll help them with that for a very reasonable price.
Right. Right, right. Okay. Makes sense. I think it's funny they still offload it. They just don't wanna do the creative part.
You know, from the moment-
That's so interesting.
we started creating QuickFrame, I'll say this, is everyone was like, "Okay, so is this gonna replace the creator? I said, "The response from the market is gonna be, 'Oh, so now I have to create the videos too?'
Yeah.
Everyone's always, if they can delegate, they're gonna delegate.
Yeah.
Especially the people even with AI, you still want someone who has a sense of aesthetics. Right?
Yeah.
Like
That is a specialized.
right. When you said, like, sometimes you see ads that are cringey on CNN.
Yeah, yeah.
like, they probably were not created.
By a creative.
right, exactly.
Yes. Probably some finance person did it.
Exactly. Yeah.
They don't stay right.
Right
commercial space.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay. Where you're using AI today, internally, do you actually Like, how are you using it, and where today is your, like, new forms of AI, generative AI, showing results either on the revenue or the cost side?
Yeah. Where you have a site license, of course, people can use whatever tools they want.
I won't say who. I don't want to enter that debate.
Okay
of OpenAI versus Anthropic or anything like that so t he whole company has access to AI tools, and then we're doing things where people are sharing how they're using them.
Okay.
Is that a billboard, like a? [audio distortion]
No, more like, group meetings over Zoom.
I see.
Things like that facilitated by some of the leadership. For different areas. This is across the company. Our engineering team, o ur sales team, our marketing team, and they're learning, like, what, like, where it's offering benefits that maybe some people didn't think about. Also, like any new technology, on an individual level, there are early adopters.
There are late adopters.
Yes.
The late adopters seeing the, you know, the benefits the early adopters.
are another way to, you know, kinda amplify the use of technology. We're viewing it as more of a, like, it slows the growth on headcount rather than.
Much it replaces. When we do see roles in a company that don't make sense anymore, obviously we're gonna make changes there. What we wanna do is move quickly. We wanna grow and, you know, it ultimately, we don't wanna cut our ability to execute by just viewing it as a cost cutting. It's more about moving faster.
Your revenue is decelerating.
Yeah
wouldn't this imply that your revenue should be accelerating?
The Yeah, and-
If you're not cutting costs and you want this to be a revenue accelerator, but I have revenue falling.
Well, our sequential quarter-over-quarter revenue growth this
Yeah
Meaning Q2 over Q1 for this year.
is more than twice the size it was last year.
Our, in terms of actual dollars added into the business.
Our revenue is actually growing faster. We're adding more $ Q2 over Q1, and again, as we go into the second half of the year, all of this is contributing in order to, you know, why we guided higher in the second half of the year.
Well, I guess presumably if it doesn't accelerate, you'll have to start cutting costs.
Maybe.
Your first choice is to accelerate revenue growth.
Yeah. As our revenue grows, if we hold our costs, we're cutting costs.
Yeah, yeah. [crosstalk]
In a sense that-
That I agree
Yeah.
Okay. we keep track, as you know, of FTEs, so we're, you know, the guys that are really using the big hyperscalers.
are all cutting people.
Yeah
as they're adopting these gen AI tools.
Yeah
Well, I don't think we overhired as much as maybe some other companies.
Maybe they did. Yeah, that's possible.
We've seen, like, we took our sales operations team and a lot of what that team does has been fully automated. Those are areas where we see, like, there's a lot of human hands and human steps in that process.
Yes
Now fully automated, so you get two benefits. You cut the cost, and it's actually more accurate.
Meaning it it's faster
Less mistakes.
less mistakes, more accurate.
Yeah, that's true.
You cut cost. On the engineering side, we build a lot of technology. We absolutely don't wanna cut engineers, but we wanna amplify their contribution.
Yes. Yes.
That's where we view it more as let's move faster rather than you know, like cutting people. One in two people at MNTN is on the engineering team. I don't see that changing at all. We're, I think as a company we've never been producing product at a faster rate than we are right now.
If you're producing product, we would expect to see that in the revenue line.
Yeah,
Assuming you can charge for the products and they're not free.
Everything needs product market fit.
Okay
release it, see people use it, adjust it. I don't wanna preannounce, but we have a lot of exciting stuff that's in process.
Okay. Are you charging for it? You're not just including it in what you have?
Yeah, yeah.
Some of it is enhancements on the targeting side.
Okay
that's just included.
Some of it is, you know, new things that we're working on that are being tested with customers. There's quite a bit of AI technology that we have in new, you know, kind of new uses of AI models within our product.
We'll be announcing these, you know, as we feel like they're coming out of beta and they're fully production.
I'm trying to get at the money. Where you have new tech, like where you said you're gonna be announcing, does it just upgrade your product that you have already, or is it an upsell?
Yeah. Well, it's not an upsell, but we are investing to basically continue to grow at the rates we are or faster.
Okay. This is one of my big takeaways from POSSIBLE in Miami was that a lot of people are doing AI work and just including it in their product.
Yeah
which I don't like.
Yeah.
Like, I want money.
Yeah.
Like, I don't want you just to keep 'Cause what it says to me is you're discounting price, that if you have to add new stuff to keep your market share that to me is like a pricing discount.
Yeah
if you can't upsell.
Yeah. I mean, I anticipate our revenue's gonna grow. I absolutely, you know, like, we need to see all the technology we've built in market, people paying for it before, you know, I wanna talk about the financial profile of that in the future.
Okay. Great. One of the things that's really true in ad tech right now is we're getting this supply path optimizations where DSPs are disintermediating SSPs and vice versa. Assuming that is successful, that we get these sort of open internet take rates down from the 40% level towards the 20% level, let's say, does your take rates suffer, and do you get injured by this SPO?
Yeah. For MNTN, absolutely not and t he reason why is we already have private marketplace deals with pretty much every source of inventory in the industry streaming network, FAST network, and so forth. It is the publisher's decision.
if they use an SSP and who that is. It is not our decision. We don't pay publishers. That might show up in the pricing we get from the publishers if they choose not to use an SSP. It doesn't at all affect, you know, our MNTN's economics. We were already kind of set up for this.
I think in the, you know, You think of a more classic DSP platform with a media buyer, a programmatic media buyer.
Yeah
where, you know, they view their value as cutting costs.
Things like that. That's a kind of a different scenario.
yeah, I agree with you. There's a lot of, like, are SSPs becoming DSPs and DSPs.
Yeah
becoming SSPs. MNTN is a platform for small mid-sized businesses to drive results through performance marketing on television.
Right. They can stop spending the money if they're not getting performance.
Exactly.
They don't care what's happening with these fees over here.
Yeah. That it's not a topic that they're aware of, and it's kind of just they're insulated from.
MNTN, we have direct relationships, so we're somewhat insulated from it also.
For on the supply side.
On the supply side.
If I'll give you a very specific example.
Okay.
The NBCUniversal owns FreeWheel.
Yes.
If they want us to buy through FreeWheel, you know, execute those buys through FreeWheel, great. If they say, "We don't need FreeWheel anymore," great.
It doesn't change any aspect of our relationship with that specific publisher.
Right.
we're kind of, that's their decision.
We're happy to buy wherever we get the fastest execution.
The highest return.
Exactly
ad spend.
Exactly.
'Cause your publisher spends more if you get five times return on the dollar versus if you get a two times return on the dollar.
Yeah. Now, if you're a big agency, your role with a big advertiser is to cut costs wherever you can find it. It's a different relationship.
It's a different thing.
Yeah.
Yeah. That is. Questions from the audience for MNTN? Okay. Okay. Is your view that in the near term open internet benefits from generative AI disruption versus walled gardens versus open internet? Who wins and loses?
I think open internet benefits, and the reason why. Now, let me step back a second.
In order to benefit, you have to embrace change.
Okay.
Okay? If you're a company that is not tech forward, that is not change forward.
Yeah
the, that is trying to protect your position rather than expand your position, you know, that's a choice. You're operating out of fear, and that's a choice you're making. If you're a company that's leaned in to being a market leader, then it's entirely different scenario. In that scenario where you're market leader, you benefit. Why do you benefit? Because AI is democratizing the models across the industry, like the targeting models.
Now you can leverage AI technology, LLMs.
I'll give you a very concrete example.
Okay.
When we serve ads, we wanna serve ads to specific consumers that are gonna respond to a specific product, right?
Example, the Onewheel. They sell single-wheel skateboard.
Oh.
Looks really cool.
Yeah, it does. I've seen it.
You see it in Manhattan.
Yeah. Yeah.
It also looks very dangerous, right?
It does. Looks really dangerous.
How do you find the consumer that's not only gonna like seeing someone on it, but wanna spend almost $2,000 to risk their life on it? Right?
That's a lot of money.
The way you do that is First you need an LLM in order to say, "Who would buy this?
Like, the, like-
What's the profile of this consumer?
Okay.
Not, like, age, gender, geo. Like, this is an adventure seeker. This is someone that probably owns a surfboard if they live on.
in California.
They might go heli-skiing, you know, in Canada.
They have to have a lot of money, too.
Exactly. You build a profile using LLM. You couldn't do that two years ago, right?
True.
Right? Then you apply machine learning models. Once you have that profile, then you take large pools of data and you run those models.
to find those individuals using machine learning models, and then you use our relationships with the networks to deliver that ad.
Yeah
directly in that person's home. The first two steps.
Two years ago, that was very different technology stack than it is today. That's an example of how AI is leveling the playing field because Google, people are just literally typing in what they're interested in.
Meta, obviously, I think they have something like 30,000 engineers.
Now AI technology is leveling the playing field in terms of targeting.
It's laying the playing field. Just apply that example across the entire tech stack for advertising.
Okay.
To be that winner, you have to be heavily invested in technology, and that part of it is obviously self-serving. That's why one in two people at MNTN are on the engineering team, and me personally, I'm a coding engineer. I don't get to code unfortunately as much.
Yeah
certainly can hold up my end of the conversation.
Everybody's saying that. I have a lot of CEOs, like the Reddit CEO, the Taboola CEO, it's like, "I know I'm supposed to be leading people, but I spend four hours a day on Claude, and it's the most exciting. I'm so happy to be back, you know, learning new things in code.
I'm not spending four hours a day on Claude, but I'm definitely four hours of conversations about our products and technology.
Yeah. I think a lot of people are softer than that.
I use obviously, like everyone else, I use a lot of AI technology.
I do wish my retirement job many, many years from now will be coding.
Yeah. A lot of CEOs love the coding stuff.
That's my love. Yeah.
Okay, in the near term, you think the open internet benefits from because walled gardens are cutting people as they move towards these LLMs, and they're accelerating revenue growth because they have cloud? A lot of them have cloud.
Yeah. I also think brands want, just like investors want a diversified-
Yeah
portfolio-
Brands
They want a diversified marketing portfolio.
Right. Okay.
The
It's true.
the, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's vision of, like, "Just give us all your money, and we'll, you know, you can just be a drop shipper, and we'll do everything else.
Yeah
I don't think builds brands. I don't think is how people view it. I think they view it as we understand the customer and we leverage all this technology to lower the cost to reach that consumer and then c onnect with them.
Okay.Well, I definitely see the niche aspect of what you do for, like, that the $2,000 skateboard.
Yeah.
I totally see how that is a value add, 'cause there might be, in the world, there might be 3,000 guys.
Yeah.
If you sold even, like, you know, 500 of these, that's an awesome Return on Investment.
Yeah. They sell 10,000 a year. They're doing well.
Do they really?
There's 10,000 lunatics on the
A year
On a year.
I own one, so.
You own one? Is it as dangerous as it looks?
Yeah.
It is as dangerous as it looks.
So I don't get-
You know, I thought wheelies were dangerous.
I don't get to ride it very often.
Oh, my goodness.
My fiance is kind of, like, not as risk-averse as I am.
She's got you on hourly.
Yeah.
Okay. You can do two hours a month.
Yeah.
That's as much risk as I'm willing to partner with.
Exactly.
Okay. As ad buyers demand more transparency and large publishers gain negotiating leverage, how would you think about your take rates over time?
I think they're very stable. For us in particular, our customers, the way they view MNTN's platform is let's say they had $10,000 they could spend on social.
$10,000 they could spend on search, or $10,000 they could spend on Performance TV.
Yes.
In none of those conversations is take rate.
additional fees, anything a part of it.
It is just money allocated to drive a result.
How much revenue lift do I get?
Right.
Performance TV is the highest, which it should be.
Yeah
'cause they've spent the least there, if 95% have never spent a dollar.
Right.
As long as it performs, all this money, in theory, can move.
Yeah.
It isn't a take rate.
Exactly.
Okay.
That's not part of the conversation.
Right.
In the enterprise side.
of the market-
Okay
with agencies, that's a very different scenario.
Okay.
That's not a very big part of your business, right?
That's a zero part of our business.
Yeah. Okay.
We are small and midsize.
Right, right.
We're literally zero-
It's all performance, 100% performance.
Exactly.
Okay. That makes sense. Okay. Any other questions? Okay, I'm gonna call it there, 'cause we have eight seconds left. We're right on time.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.