Navigating The New Era of TV Advertising with Mark Douglas, President, and CEO of MNTN

When there's every one of those companies spending a lot, you know, focusing on paid social and paid search have been excluded from television advertising because of all those things upfronts and stuff like that. That was a dam waiting to burst. And so when we launched, and I don't want to pretend like I just called this, but our whole sales cycle is just demo it to just make people aware it's even possible that they can advertise on tv and we started picking up customers.

To thrive in a rapidly evolving landsc, brands must move at an ever increasing pace. I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of susee. Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now and how you can keep up. Welcome to the speed of Culture up. Today we're going to be speaking with Mark Douglas, CEO and president at Mountain. Mark, great to see you.

Thanks for inviting me.

You guys have been making a lot of noise in the connected TV space and I'd love to just first start by getting to know a little bit more about you and your background and how you took the road to where you are today.

Well, me personally, I started as a coding engineer. I'm a self taught engineer. I've been coding most of my adult life. I like building products and that led me through a series of companies. Oracle, I was early there back in the day working with Marc Benioff, Tom Siebel and others. And then Marc Benioff was a director in desktop products division and I was early engineer in applications division director in that division. So that's how he and I met. And Tom Siebel was like starting up Oracle's inside sales teams. This was quite a while ago but a lot of fun. And then eventually Internet infrastructure in the mid-90s and then moved to LA in 2000. Series of companies I started. Then I moved to LA in the early 2000s to lead engineering at eharmony when online dating was becoming a thing. Eharmony and match and then learned a lot about marketing and then eventually started Mountain and launched the Mountain to essentially reinvent television advertising to make it accessible to everyone.

And what drew you to the television space?

Well, what happened was actually in 2017 I was meeting with a lot of agencies and asking them what they thought, like not even television, just where they saw marketing going and didn't get a lot of interesting responses. So I asked everyone, what do you think about streaming? Like what do you think is going to happen with streaming and advertising? And everyone I met with Referred to it as, oh, that's way out in the future. Now this is late 2017, this is not 2011. And they were like, oh, this is way out in the future that, you know, people are going to move slowly. It's not going to have much of an impact anytime soon. I said, well, how are you watching tv? And they all said, oh, I have an Apple tv, I have a Roku. So after a bunch of these meetings, I'm like, I'm going all in on connected tv. Everyone, their behavior and their words did not match up.

It reminds me, you know, there was a time when in 2003 I was doing a lot of work targeting college students and 30% of college students said an Apple was the next computer they were going to buy, but they only had 3% market share. So I knew at that point I should have put every dollar I had an Apple stock at that point. So it sounds like it's sort of.

A similar experience, it's similar thing. So I'm like, well, if you all think it's way out in the future, but all your behavior is now, then I'll make it now. And so we launched The Mountain Performance TV platform in 2018 and it's grown just tremendously. The biggest thing is it's more than two thirds of our customer base are advertising on TV for the first time on Mountain's platform. Brands of all sizes who found television advertising to be very expensive, hard to enter that market to become essentially a television advertiser and creative was time consuming all these things we essentially said with streaming, let's just fix all these things and find a new set of advertisers. And that's what we did.

So it sounds like your product Mountain essentially creates a programmatic television advertising overlay onto like multiple OTT platforms. Is that a good way to describe it?

Yeah, the simplest way to think about it doesn't look anything like this, but Luma Partners, the team there, founded it. So Terry, I did a demo for him a few years ago and he said, this is AdWords for television. You can do it yourself. All the tools are there. You can target any consumer you want. You literally upload your TV commercial into our platform and you're live on every TV network in America. You're live on Hulu, you're live on Roku's content, like anywhere that's ad supported video. We're there with full targeting, full measurement, fully integrated into all your other tools like Google Analytics. So it's. Yeah, we had a real vision for it and We've really focused and stuck to that vision and it's been an exciting ride.

I mean, that's really intriguing. I spend a lot of time on programmatic tools, whether it be Facebook's platform or Google's platform building Susie's business. I've often tried to get on television because television has this perception of grandeur where people see you on TV and it builds a type of credibility almost like out of home does, but even more impactful and has been something that has been out of touch for smaller advertisers for so long. So it's incredibly intriguing. How good is the targeting relative to targeting display or other mediums on the Mountain platform?

Well, similar targeting data. We partner with Oracle Data Cloud, we partner with LiveRamp for third party data. For first party data. We have our own first party data system. That's very, I think it's very good. And we even allow customers to use CRM data so they can upload lists of like, let's say they have retail stores, they can take the email addresses and phone numbers they get there and they can upload those into our platform and target there. And that's actually our fastest growing, growing method of targeting for the platform. So obviously we do our marketing, right, and we have, we're fortunate to have Ryan Reynolds leading and George Dewey, our CMO leading our marketing, plus some other people on Team Reagan and Ali. And so we use our own platform. That's our number two Source Elites is Mountain advertising our brand on tv? Our number one, by the way, is Organic Search on Google, which is, you know, like the, the demo video we did with the Ghost Pepper and Steve O. So Organic Search is number one and Mountain's own platform is our number two.

That's incredible. So we have to get on that, Suzy, and using that, if it's working for you guys, we'll have to figure that out. So we'll talk to you guys afterwards. So tell us about Ryan Reynolds. How did that relationship come about and kind of what role is he playing as you continue to build your brand in the space?

Sure. So Ryan's our chief creative officer and so he's impacting the company in a number of different ways. So one, he's obviously very involved in Mountain's own marketing effort and building the Mountain brand, but he also works with our customers. So if you go back to something I said, I think I said a moment ago, two thirds of our customer base have never advertised on TV before. So we basically, they don't have TV commercials. And so right around the Time I met Ryan, which was last April, we were trying to figure out like, how do we make that easier for our customers? And Ryan has maximum effort marketing the marketing agency he created after the for to market the original Deadpool movie and, and all his movies after that. And so it just kind of, as they say, it's like this marriage just, it was love at first sight kind of deal. So we have this need and he has this agency and we just instantly connected over how we can show people and build a solution so that our customers could build TV ads. But do it cost effectively. What he calls fast advertising, where you can just do it quickly cost effectively like a TV commercial. The amount of money people spend on TV commercials compared to the amount of money they spend spend on like a video, on an ad for TikTok or Instagram. It just doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I mean, your addressable market is the biggest it gets, right? I mean, that's where all the, most of the money still goes in advertising, despite Google and Facebook's meteoric rise. I mean, most of the big brands are spending on television, but the small brands, to your point, it hasn't been accessible to them.

Yeah. And I totally agree. And then what was interesting when I first met Ryan, he said something very interesting to me. He said he was, he said it took me eight, it took him eight years to make Deadpool. But if he creates a 30 second commercial that can be done in like two days and more people see it than the movie could have a bigger.

Business impact than the movie.

Right? Yeah. So his, he, I mean, he's truly like this person that just loves to put out ideas and things that are culturally relevant. And so with advertising he can just do that like constantly. And he loves doing it. So it's been amazing working together. And I don't know, it just happened. Like it took literally like less than a week for us to go from meeting each other and his team to we're all like, let's do this, let's make. Let's have Maxim effort and mountain become one company.

And what's interesting is a lot of times when companies work with celebrities, you know, they're not really involved in the business, they're just the figurehead. But Ryan is really, truly a prolific entrepreneur and has been involved in so much more than Hollywood and so much more than acting. So he's someone that's a true value add, not just somebody you're slapping next to your brand's name to build extra credibility with the masses.

Yeah, I mean, Ryan Picks up the phone like Ryan makes calls, he does sales calls for Mountain. It's, it's pretty, there's no one I've seen. We'll end with this. Probably a good time to start talking about Ryan, but it's the biggest compliment. I've never seen anyone that works as hard as him. I mean he gets up early, he works a long day, but he, you know, he, we all are doing stuff that we really enjoy doing. So I mean we could go on and on and on, but that was the most almost shocking thing. It was like I send him a text message and he's reading it at like 4:30 in the morning after he slept for the night. He's not staggering home at 4, 4:30 in the morning.

So one of the, you know, obviously we've seen a major shift in advertising from brand messaging to much more performance bottom funnel and obviously that's almost had diminishing returns over time as we've seen especially recently, Apple's iOS 14 changes, which makes it harder to track. But that being said, I mean a lot of advertisers, especially in this economy still are focused on roi. So the one thing that differentiates television from digital is I think it's more challenging to measure, right? Or is it? How does Mountain look at measurement and the impact of its, of its ads on, on its end user?

So we call our platform Mountain Performance tv. So it's all about all the tools to both target, set up the campaign, we stream it, we deliver it, we all the media buying is fully automated and then we track all the visits and the conversions that come from that. And so you're right, you can't click on a TV ad. So we use household IP and other signals to essentially do cross device attribution. And that's something that like Google and Meta do. Now they use logins, right, because they track across devices. We use the household IP as the primary signal for that and that's a core part of the value that we deliver. And it's why we, you know, big part of why we call it performance tv. This. So there are virtually relatively few brand advertising campaigns running on our platform because all of our customers, like you said, are focused on return on ad spend, cost per acquisition. And even the brand advertisers, when they now have the ability to do that for television, to think of TV as a performance channel, you know they do. And when you think of some of the biggest performance advertisers, like someone like Geico, like 15 minutes can save you 15% or more on your car insurance is probably the most well known call to action in the history of advertising. Like that is performance advertising. Now they had the scale to be able to just do that on TV without a platform like Mountain. But we brought that kind of ability to essentially any size advertiser. And we have multi billion dollar brands on our platform. We have mid sized brands. It's a pretty broad cross. You'd be surprised some of the larger brands, especially in retail, that are just not comfortable doing TV advertising without all the data that we're talking about. Or you think of Internet brands, how many Internet brands do you see on television? They want the data to do it even though they know it's a powerful.

Right. And you said something interesting, you can't click on a TV ad. But I've been saying for years, I think the TV ultimately is going to become a giant iPad hanging on your wall. And you look at the form factor of Apple tv, right? And it looks a lot like an iPad. And ultimately I think that TVs will become touchscreens and you will be able to interact with them and you will be able to click through. And I think you guys are just kind of getting out of it.

Yeah, we would love, I mean if Samsung or LG or any or a young emerging startup is listening, count us in. Willing to test that with you. It brought back a memory of memes when the first, remember when iPhones were really tiny and then they finally came out one the size of a Samsung. I remember seeing a lot of memes. I saw one where these guys were in the back of a taxi handing each other a TV pretending that was an iPhone because they were now so large. And made me laugh when you mentioned that TVs are going to become like that, that interactive experience.

In the meantime, I do believe that the tv, the physical device of the TV is almost a commodity in the overall ecosystem, right. And it's razor thin margins. And one thing I've often thought would happen is a company like Apple or Amazon would buy a Vizio, you know, and then give away those TVs almost for free. Almost like what they're doing with the, you know, Alexa devices. So then they can essentially control the ecosystem, control the Rails. What are your thoughts on that in terms of the role of the physical TV device as part of the overall ecosystem? Is that something that's going to ultimately get commoditized?

Well, I think most people consider it commoditized now. And I think there's no more disappointing product from Apple than the current Apple TV. Right.

But it's not even a TV. That's the thing. People think Apple TV's a TV. It's not a TV. They could make a TV and maybe it'd be less disappointing if it did.

Yeah. So I think the, I do think it's commoditized even right now, although I think increasingly the software you see in it is considered very valuable. And, and you see a lot of TV manufacturers becoming part of the television ecosystem, which kind of Roku, the television advertising ecosystem, I should say, which Roku kind of led the way on. So I think there's still a lot of innovation to come there. And I don't think the television viewing experience for the next 20 years, even 10 years is like done. Like, okay, we're done. Cause we lived with one experience for a very long time, right? Like we had just like over the air, you got five channels to watch, then we got cable, which is, you know, this over. And now we have streaming. I think obviously streaming is the way of delivering, but I think the experience for the consumer still has a ways to go in terms of making it really, really seamless and having just an incredible viewing device to do to watch.

I agree 100%. And you know, talking about your industry, we're talking at it really pivotal time. It was just announced by Nielsen last week. I'm sure you saw this, that streaming viewership actually surpassed cable for the first time. And that was from Nielsen. So here you are, you talk about the conversations you had with that agencies in terms of how much now streaming has overtaken cable.

You know what's interesting about that? Even in late 2017 and then 2018, when we launched our platform, there was already a half a million households a month switching from cable to streaming. Like going all in on streaming. And if you just did the math, you just are like, okay, that's an unrelenting, that's a city a month that is saying I don't want cable anymore. Like I want all streaming experience. So if you just did the math, this was an inevitable march towards streaming. And at some point, you know, essentially cable's not even a mainstream product anymore. Obviously there's even more television viewing. But you know, if anything it's going to accelerate from here in terms of now streaming being larger than cable.

And as you know, Netflix recently announced that they're partnering with Microsoft on a new ad supported tier. Do you see Netflix kind of going direct to advertisers with Microsoft sales team? Is that competitive to you or is that additive to what you're trying to build.

No, it's definitely not competitive. I think Netflix is in a very unique position where they have a pretty significant percentage of television viewers hours that they're bringing into the television market. And so I think initially, I mean they're going to focus on a very brand heavy strategy. But I think one thing you see is if you want to grow, if you're Netflix, if you're abc, Disney, Disney with all their properties, abc, Spa and stuff like that, if you want to grow, you have to bring more advertisers in the market. You cannot keep going to a few thousand and in terms of the majority of the market, a few hundred large brand advertisers and that's your entire business strategy. There's no growth there. We have to make that. Believe it or not, in some ways television advertising is not truly a mainstream product. It's only sold to a few thousand companies until like what we're doing and other companies are doing to really open it up to emerging brands, to all size brands to now be able to use this medium. And so I think Netflix initial strategy is definitely going to be very brand heavy. But I mean that's year one, year two, you're going to, unless you want to be a market share war, you're going to have to open this up and bring new advertisers in the market. And with Microsoft involved probably with a very tech heavy approach. I mean Microsoft is not, I don't see them being interested in becoming a television network. They want to basically remain a tech company and bring more tech to, to the television market.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I was, what I was saying was adding was that you look at the upfronts and the upfronts to your point really only does invite the PNGs of the world and the major brand advertisers because that's who really the markets. But you look at a company like Facebook and the majority of their advertisers are small businesses. So I think in that kind of dichotomy there I think presents the business opportunity for mountain.

Exactly, exactly. And that's how we view it and we feel we're leading it. So we're excited about that. And we're like we're all more avod, more ad supported. Television we think is great. It's not competitive at all. We think it just makes it even easier to bring more advertisers, new young, emerging and mid sized advertisers into the market.

Yeah, absolutely. Makes sense. And the TV advertising market is one and the television market in General has just been one that's been so dated in terms of the way it works to end. You're coming in as this new disruptor. What has been your path to success to date in terms of disrupting? Because we face the same thing in the market research industry, where there's a bunch of sleepy legacy incumbents that we're trying to disrupt and you have a bunch of people that are holding on to the old way of doing things, but over time you get the early adopters and you start to break through. And I'm sure partnerships like Ryan Reynolds don't hurt doing that either. But what has been your playbook to be successful in disrupting the TV industry.

Advertising industry, we did literally think of it that way. We. The way you know, I looked at it was you've had all this innovation in the relationship between the consumer and the content. The TV network, right? And Netflix and, and Hulu kind of led that way and, and Netflix did all these things in terms of just literally in inventing streaming to a certain extent and then doing where you can binge watch and all the things they did. And Hulu was pretty early there also. But the relationship between the advertiser and that TV network essentially had not changed. And even now on streaming, you see a lot of the streaming advertising is still bought through an upfront or part of an upfront process. So we looked at that and said, look, we can innovate that relationship between the advertiser and the TV network. Just look at it and just ask people what do they love about Facebook, the current relationship and what don't they. We can make a big dent here. And so obviously they don't, honestly, they don't really like. The advertisers really like upfronts. They don't like spending huge amounts of money on creative, they don't like having to do media planning cycles, quarters, months to quarters in advance, just all these things. So we kind of set out just to reinvent all those things and then it was something really simple. It's generally going to be easier to bring new companies into that market with a new approach than to convince the existing buyers, buyers that they should switch to a new approach. So that's why we focused on bringing new advertisers in the market who are very comfortable on social, in particular, like paid social, bringing them over the television, and then those more traditional TV advertisers will follow. And that's the strategy we pursue. And it just turned out that, that what you referred to as early adopter is huge like when there's every one of those companies spending a lot, you know, focusing on paid social and paid search have been excluded from television advertising because of all those things upfronts and stuff like that. That was a dam waiting to burst. And so when we launched, and I don't want to pretend like I just called this, but our wholesale cycle was just demo it to just make people aware it's even possible that they can advertise on tv. And we started picking up customers that was. We got in front of a wave and just road that wave by essentially guiding the path and just innovating. Just take these things that are 50 years old, 50 year old business models and just reinvent them and just show people that and see how they respond. I wish it was like I could make it sound more sophisticated, but it was like build product and then show people that it's possible. And that strategy worked.

Yeah, it's a tried and true path. So let's talk about, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about your role as CEO and president of Mountain. Your background is in technology and engineering. What strikes me as unique about you is that you know how to talk, to talk as well as being somebody who can obviously code and understands the technology. And that certainly makes you rare in the business world. All that being said, how do you spend your day? What's the pie chart of your day and what you're focused on and what are your biggest initiatives right now?

Yeah, I mean it used to be, it's actually shifted recently. It used to be really like two thirds and if not 3/4 of my day was on product.

Sure. What does that mean, like actually working with the engineers or is it like.

Literally in engineering meetings standing over their shoulder?

Right, Yeah.

A year and a half ago was actually coding. Still want to wake up every morning and code. And so I'm still very involved in the product engineering side of it. I kind of personally the crossover point between kind of the business strategy and the tech strategy. Right now I spend a lot more time on partnerships. So it's more like a 50, 50 split between product focus and then customer and partnerships. And we just. And because the. As our brand has grown and the company has grown, I think the opportunity for partnerships have also grown. But I always think that like every. If there's a minute of the day where I'm like, what should I spend this minute doing? It always leans towards technology. It always leans towards, you know, what can we do better? Right now we have a big focus on. Sometimes you can Just focus on innovation so much that you forget to ask your customers, hey, do you really. Is everything we've already done, are you loving that? So right now we're having a big focus on just asking our customers of everything we've delivered in the platform so far. What could we do better? So that, And I'm excited about that because sometimes, like I said, you can, you can just get so focused on the next feature that you don't ask everyone. Like you said, you serve a meal and then you're on to the next recipe. Like, let's try and do this. And you're like, wait, you know, is everyone, could we make what we already have even better? And so, but it's all, it's a very, very heavy focus on product and technology. And the. I enjoy the partnership side, but it's not like my DNA, it's my DNA is to get a computer out and hang out with a bunch of engineers and embed stuff.

Right. And obviously technology is expensive. And you guys, thankfully your timing right, you raised just under 120 million at the end of last year. That may not be, that might not have been as easy to do right now. What are your thoughts on growth versus burn? And are you guys looking at other companies to acquire? What is your growth plan heading into 2023?

We think most of our growth comes organically. We try to grow while being really responsible on cash. So we've never been a company that has like a huge burn rate to drive growth. And, you know, we just focus on making sure we're, you know, hitting the right customers. Our own marketing metrics are really strong. I mean, and they were before Ryan got involved. And now you have literally the, I mean, arguably the world's best marketing team marketing mountain. And so that obviously is going to bring even more. We're not generally going to just spend dollars to grow the company. We're going to focus on the things we've been talking about. Who's the right customer, what features do we have in the product, you know, and just delivering. And that's kind of the strategy for the company. I mean, it's keep it all. These things seem to work the best when you keep them simple. So that's what we're trying to do.

Well, that was amazing. And you obviously have a lot going on in the beginning. I'm so thankful for your time. And joining us at the Speed of Culture podcast, I'd love to know, in this fast paced world, Mark, what slows you down personally? What's worth slowing down for? In your life to get away from the madness of connected tv.

Well, recently I really liked the water. I'm in Rhode island right now, just enjoying a summer in Rhode island of all places. That's a really pretty state. And you really feel like it's a historic place. It's the closest to getting on a plane and going to UK that I think you can get in the United States. You feel like, wait, this is like I'm walking through history right now. So for me, lately it's just been that I travel. I really, during the pandemic, I did not stay stationary. I mean, I stayed a number of places for a long time, but I traveled a bit. And so for me, it's this ability to work from home, but make home anywhere I am. And so right now that's enjoy. I'm literally on a dock at a restaurant or just by a restaurant in Rhode island and just enjoying a summer day here while I'm talking.

That's amazing. You're like a duck, right? Running really quickly below the surface, but on top, you're chilling on the island.

I love it. And enjoy.

Well, thanks again, Mark. On behalf of Susie and Adwee team. Thanks to all of our audience for joining us. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Be sure to check out mountaintn.com an incredible technology platform that I'm sure is going to continue to innovate in this space space. So be on behalf of myself and the team, thanks again and we'll see you next time. Take care, everyone. The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Suzy as part of the Adweek Podcast Network and AAST Creator Network. You can listen subscribe to all Adweek's podcast by visiting adweek.com podcast to find out more about Susie, head to Suzy.com and make sure to search for the speed of culture in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Click follow so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Suzy, thanks for listening.