Disrupting the Adtech Game with Mark Douglas

Most real core marketing is just lots and lots of experimentation. Yep. Assuming you know nothing about the consumer, you don't know what's going to work. So let's try a lot of different ideas. Welcome to Disruption Now. I'm your host, and moderator, Rob Richardson. With me on the show is Mark Douglas with MNTN He's a serial entrepreneur. He's a creative and he's done lots of interesting things.

And we're going to talk about MNTN and how that technology now is using the power of A.I. and simplicity to make it easy to buy. Ads specifically on smart TVs and smart channels like Hulu and others. So it's an honor to have him on the show. Mark, how are you doing, brother? Good. Thanks for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. Well, we're happy to have you. So it's your company is very interesting.

And before we dive down the rabbit hole of talking about what you do in your company, which we certainly want to do that, I always like to have a conversation with founders and really learn about their journey, learn about their struggles, and just learn about their learnings. Essentially. So I see you used to work for eHarmony, is that right? Was that one of your.

Started out I was head of engineering at eHarmony during their heyday, pre Tinder pre Bumble and it was like Match.com and eHarmony and essentially inventing online dating. Yeah, we're going to age ourselves here. I remember eHarmony, so yeah. I mean, people did not embrace it. It was like they felt like dating failures if they had to go on an online dating site at the time. But eHarmony. What did you learn from that I'm curious. That's a that's a great really entry point, right?

It's because the concept obviously was the right concept. It's it still is around. It's probably booming in some ways. What lesson did that experience of eHarmony like? How did that help inform your experience now of leading a tech company versus being an executive at eHarmony? You know, it. The biggest lesson I learned was the how subtle changes in your focus and and your message can really resonate because eHarmony initially like wasn't doing that well.

Like people just were not that eHarmony was all about long term relationships and matching you with that perfect someone and it just wasn't really resonating in the context of the word dating. And the company actually got pretty close to running out of money and shutting down and then very close to the end, like the companies out of money, the founder Neil Clark Warren, he went on a radio show kind of like a podcast.

And instead of talking about dating, he talked about marriage and the same, you know, eHarmony is the same thing. But he's like he was like, you know, it's just all about creating like successful marriages lead to generations of of healthy people. And that like, literally that like the next day, the site went from 50 signed people signing up a day to thousands. And now the product did not change. And just

you know what the company was about explaining it ironically in a more pure sense, because that was he was a clinical psychologist and marriage counselor and so he just wanted to use the Internet to help create successful relationships. And that that just exploded from there.

And like how many like in you don't have to be a company that's like close to running out of money just you launched the product and it's like relatively subtle changes can have a very very big impact on the ultimate outcome and that that was the single biggest lesson learned throughout my time there. We had more things like that in the product and other things where was just like small navigational changes you can apply to your life can wind up having very, very big changes in the outcome.

So that that was the basis I think from there Small changes make big differences. And that's It's a great point. I would and, it sounds like it almost happened by accident, but now that you kind of reverse engineer, what lessons would you have for how for a founder like myself, like others that may be listening to this about. Yeah. To figure out where where are those. Right. Small differences of it could be messaging or other points to focus on so you don't have to almost run out of money.

Yeah. I mean it's interesting because on the one hand there's that cliche listen to your customers, but customers don't take you to the future, right? They don't. There's there's kind of an adage like if you cut it back in the day. So like VHS tapes and

Betamax and all that, if you ask the customer what improvements they wanted. They would say faster rewind they wouldn't go a DVD player. So there's no tape. Exactly exactly. Like they just won't tell you that. Right. And so you have to like kind of come up with the innovation yourself. But then that product market fit that. Like what is like why are people going to want this? Why are they going to what's going to resonate with them?

You really do have to like assume, you know, not like like go into and be like I'm going to assume I don't know anything about that and just listen to the customer but do it quickly like that fail fast mentality like right, like no one really. There's no, like, single path to success and no one really like nails it everything the first time along the way.

So it's like fail fast, you know, be totally on board for change, but still somehow stick to the core dish and that's kind of the key and it's almost like a quality. And you as an individual as in some ways you can learn it when you see people do it. But in some ways you just have to like have the right, the right qualities to be like, nope, that's not working. We had tried. Yeah, like and I've had that experience a company.

I did called Homey which was in the apartment rental space we launched in like the biggest apartment rental market in the country, which was Houston, Texas. But it turned out like individual landlords, weren't the best fit for us. And so everything we did to launch the product wound up being like, Nope, that was the wrong path. We got switched over here. Yeah. I mean, YouTube started off as a dating website. People. A lot of people don't know that, right?

Yeah. And this is encouraging for me as being if you don't know I'm podcasting but I'm also the founder of Disrupt Art, we're an NFT Marketplace focused on fashion, film and music. And it's and I'm learning about those subtleties you talk about that make a huge difference. Yeah and as you said earlier, it's not like you can't say let's see what people want as Henry Ford said had I asked what people wanted, they would have said a faster horse. Right. Right, exactly. Exactly.

So it's you got to have but I love the part of saying, okay, yes, what customers are currently doing can't be how you only focus on things, but the customer experience does have to be a big focus of what you currently have. I think that's very well stated. And so. All right, so you got there, you were at eHarmony, you pivot around, you learn. And now, of course, you're launching. You've launched this current business MNTN that is very, very fascinating.

You know, so first of all, I understand that you've actually acquired a Ryan Reynolds company Maximum Effort. Yeah, but I want to talk about that a little bit. But what does let me ask this question while you don't focus on the customer, you do focus on the problem you're solving with MNTN What problem do you feel like MNTN is solving for the current environment? Well, in some way, well, the problem with solving is so basically in some ways just democratize the television advertising market.

Okay. So if you if you back up just a little and you look at television viewing Netflix and to some extent Hulu, also, they just completely led the way in changing that relationship between the consumer and the content and making it on demand. Netflix You see all the shows going further and you can see an entire season the shows on the same day if you want to binge watch it. And Netflix essentially invented binge watching. Yes, they did. Yeah. And so that relates and consumers responded

and then the industry followed. Right now, it seems normal that every TV network has essentially all of that content available on demand, but three years ago, even that wasn't the case. I mean, it was still like like that. That wasn't the way it was.

So then we looked at and said, okay, the whole television viewing experience has been transformed, but now I still got to do an upfront, I still have to at, you know, all the advertising that essentially bundles most this content is still stuck in a 50 maybe even 70 year old business model. So we said everything that people consider normal about television advertising, high cost of creative, you know, basically long lead times.

on planning the high minimums upfronts. All of that is really not that normal. No one would go in it as customers say, yeah, that's what I want. I want, you know. And so we're like, Well, let's just reinvent all that to let in. In the end, we did. But then what?

You know what the interesting thing that's another entrepreneurial lesson is when you read, when you attempt to reinvent an existing market, the people currently operating in the market are usually the slowest to embrace that those changes Oh, yes and yes. Right, right. And so we set so our goal was, well, let's bring a whole new set of customers into television advertising,

market. Mid-sized companies or large companies that are more like the direct response advertisers that Google and and Meta their thrive on and let's bring television to them they haven't been your average ecommerce site just never advertised on TV As a matter of fact just tech companies. If you look at any tech company in general, you don't see a ton of the tech television ads right now. Because they've got they're going to advertise on Google, Facebook, targeted ads. You know, they want data.

They want. Absolutely. Targeted advertising. They want lots of data to inform the amount of money they're spending. And so we set out so we said, look, we can reinvent all this, we can modernize it, but let's we're going to have to find a new customer. And it wasn't as thought out as it is now. Yeah. Explain. Now, like, oh, I had this all mapped out. Yeah, yeah. Look, I get it It did go pretty well.

I will say that it wasn't a lot of changes, but you know, you kind of kind of stumble along a bit, right? And we have we went to those customers and they were fully on board. The idea is like, Oh, wait, I'm doing like a ton on paid service. I spent a ton on paid social

So now potentially I can use television and have, you know, audience first targeting, you know, basics like digital targeting. But now in television it resonated really well and that that's that became performance television. And so we essentially created the market for Performance TV. I said something, my team, that's another entrepreneur. The easiest way to win a market is to create that market. Oh, that's a mic drop The easiest way to create a market. To win a market is to create that market.

I mean, it's also a classic. The easiest way to win a market is to create it That's what Elon Musk said, which essentially created the market for electric cars. And then like you, you're inherently the market leader like you, you're now dominating the market, you're created. And that's what we do with performance today and I'm going to ask a question about that because it's it's yes, that's great. How does one go about doing that? So I'm looking at it from this point of view.

It's like, all right, yes, you're absolutely right. You the traditional people that are doing this are slowest to change because they have their big boards. They have to do studies. They take two years to make a decision and they wait for everyone else to go that way because they are large institutions with lots of runway and lots of time and lots of bureaucracy,

they can do those things. It's it was the right pivot that it sounds like you it sounds like that you made was going to institutions that are more midsized, smaller, innovative, growing those who use Facebook ads, Instagram ads, it sounds like. Exactly. You know, Google ads, things like that. But how do you convince that group still that may be your target market, that they need something that they don't know that they actually need either? How does one go about doing that?

You can speak from your practical experience is just kind of give some general advice I think would be very helpful. Yeah. So the nice thing for us is that that segment of market, what's called direct response marketing, are very data driven. And so because they're so data driven, they tend to be very open to new ideas and they're like, Yeah, I'll try it, but we'll just look at the data and see you know, let's see what it looks like. So you still have to find the early adopters.

They're the ones that but they the they it just we just happen to be fortunate that we were going into market with the marketers are that our customer which they're the marketers were very open to trying new things. And so the existing kind of brand advertising market, they were not open to try new things, but in the direct response market they were very open to try new things. They also felt very dependent on Google and at the time Facebook.

You know, I never know whether I should call it Meta or Facebook. Oh, you. Probably know it. You know, they want to rebrand. No one knows it as Meta I think they're hoping that people will forget that they were Facebook at one point. So but but we're seeing about where we remember we remember them as Facebook.

Facebook. Yeah. And so they so you had this you had this set of customers that were very beholden to Google and Facebook at the same time, which made them very eager to find alternatives or, you know, additional avenues to reach to find new consumers. And at the same time, they were super data driven. So there's very little emotion involved in the decision process. It was just like, Yeah, I have a test budget, let's try it. Let's see what the data shows.

And now we're continue to expand beyond what you can think of as that early group. A customer in that group is fairly large. So yeah, we didn't struggled to find people. It was, it was just all about getting a the biggest obstacle we had in our sales process when we launched. Is just getting people to believe it. Like we literally have people on the phone going, Wait, what you can now, like I don't have to call an agency.

It was to me, it was like E-Trade in the mid-nineties, like, like, like when the internet was just taking off. Like what? I don't have to call a stockbroker if I want to like just democratizing investing essentially. And it was a very similar thing that, yeah. I'm a Web3 person. It's about democratizing the creative and people, and a lot of creatives don't believe it. Like, what are people going to pay me to just to have access to digital images and digital ownership like, yeah, it is, yeah.

Yeah. So we, we follow that path and it worked really well. The company has grown pretty nicely That's, that's great to hear. I think I'd like to explore something with it. I'm curious to see how it works now because as we look toward marketing, I'm interested to figure it out. How do you help people determine their do you actually help them? It sounds like you help determine their their customers and everything else like that.

How do you go about stepping through that process in terms of just basic, just high level? If you're helping people, I guess, target the right customers and then using your technology to do that, like what would be like a really high level basic walk through of that. Well so one our customers again tend to be marketers doing okay. So they know it already. They know their customer. They have knowledge and it's bringing those kinds of tools where they they can figure out who their audience is.

So we're a software solution. We're not their agency. We if they have an agency, most of our customers don't but if They have an agency we'll partner with that agency. But it's bringing those same kind of digital tools to television in this self-serve platform where they can be comfortable experimenting, trying different audiences they want to reach, trying different creative and having all this data available to measure how that's going

that that's what we're doing for them. Then we partner, we have a customer success team that gives a lot of advice and will partner with any agencies that they might be working with also, but it's those kind of marketers are not everyone thinks of marketing tend to think like mad men where you know you come up. Yeah yeah. Incredible, incredible idea. But most real core marketing is just lots and lots of experimentation.

Yep. Assuming you know nothing about the consumer, you don't know what's going to work. So let's try a lot of different ideas. And again, it's that fail fast mentality that didn't work. Let's try this one that's working pretty well. Let's see if we can get it even better. That's kind of the cycle that that most, most marketers really spend their days doing. Yeah, that's well-stated. Yeah. I want to pivot a little bit to talk about Ryan Reynolds.

I mean, I can't have an interview and not talk about how your company as I understand it, MNTN actually bought Maximum Effort, which is a company of Ryan Reynolds like. And my understanding is Ryan Reynolds has a it's like a it was a like creative almost like they were they made creative content and you bought them. Walk me through what that was like, that process in general. What what's it like to work to work with to work with Ryan he is he as funny as he seems on TV?

He seems funny So I was asked this question a few months ago that literally that question what's it like to work with Ryan? And I said, well, the first month you try not to laugh at everything he says, because then you just seem like a giggling schoolgirl. I think a schoolboy I guess so he is very the Ryan you see on screen is Ryan. I mean he's just a very genuine guy. He is very quick witted. You know, it's a that's a superpower. I wish I was as quick witted as he is.

Just whatever you say, he knows what to say next he's also just a really nice person. How this came about is I think for Ryan and creating maximum effort that came out of Deadpool because the movie studio when they made Deadpool they gave him virtually no marketing budget. So he created his own agency to market the film and to do it at very, very low cost. And obviously, I think that Deadpool went on to make more than $1,000,000,000 at the box office.

So it was if I'm getting those numbers right. So and then he told me, you know, he said when we first met, we met last April. He said, it took me eight years to make Deadpool, but I can make a commercial in a weekend and more people see it and more people wind up seeing it might go viral if you like it. And he's like, I'd rather do lots of those. I've done it. Yeah, he said. He says.

I asked him more than 50 movies like I could create 50 commercials this year, you know, like, and just make people laugh and then attain but at the same time connect them with products and services that hopefully they would like. So that's how it came about. We met because we would think someone recommended that we connect and luckily some people we both knew kind of connected us. And I showed him what we were doing.

I gave him a product demo, said, like we're Reinventing television advertising and democratizing, just making it so anyone can approach this. And he immediately was like, Wow, I want to be a part of this. And and it literally only took a few day. I think it took two days to go from first hi to let's team up and.

Wow. Yeah so legally yeah MNTN did acquire the agency Maximum Effort but I mean obviously it's Ryan Reynolds it's a it's a partnership right and they he and he's a smart guy he works incredibly hard. It's actually hard to keep up with how hard he works. I mean, it's I think I thought I worked a lot of hours until I saw his work. Yeah. Same. So he's incredible work ethic, very smart and ready to do whatever it takes to win. Nothing is off limits.

And but at the same time, I mean, he's obviously one of the biggest celebrities in the world. So and that and that does offer a lot of advantages. The biggest advantage is he never has to show his ID It must be nice that your face is your ID when you walk in like we walk in the building in that it's like he knows that he doesn't have to show his ID They just say, We know who you are. You. You can head upstairs. What? Hey, come on. It's not fair like they look at me suspiciously.

That's hilarious. I'm curious. As you said, you're combining with a brilliant creative like Ryan Reynolds, and we have this new creative economy and what we focus on. We do a lot of Web3 thoughts about the intersection between Web3 blockchain, what's maybe what's happening with data in entertainment there, and then what's happening with what you're doing with data in this

and the direct TV, do you see what do you see as the future there or have you thought about the intersection between the next evolution of the Internet and what's what and where you currently are now? Well, definitely, in terms of things like Metaverse and and those kinds of aspects and being very receptive to where that goes. And I think every new medium. creates new forms of content.

And generally a lot of content is funded by advertising, by companies wanting to connect with that consumer, and it tends to reinvent the formats for that advertising. Also, even avenues like what Netflix is doing right now, they entered the television market. Like I've said to them, like your ads don't have to be 30 second TV ads. No legacy? They could be something entirely like Snapchat They could be immersive ads. Right, right. Snapchat and Instagram. They don't have the same ad formats.

They're very, very different. And the fact that I'm wearing my UC brand and this is an advertisement period the advertisement itself doesn't have to be blah blah blah

that when people actually culture has shown this with, hip hop, right, things become famous. Someone says a line in a hip hop ad and show it has a has a beverage with them. All of a sudden that beverage sells everywhere because. Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So you're making the point. I mean, that's a good point. I mean, ultimately, like the idea that consumers are marketed to that to me ended with the Internet.

Like if you buy a product you don't like, you are lazy as a consumer because it's so easy to check reviews, it's so easy to see what other people think. So it's not about marketing to you. It's just about like there's a lot of innovation in the world and a lot of emerging companies trying to, you know, connect with consumers or bigger companies trying to connect with consumers. It's just about like, here's what we have.

And if this interests you, like reach out, go to our website, go to our Instagram And that's what marketing has really become. And going back to Ryan, I mean, a lot of the things he does from an average of the ads he's created, there's like this, this like sincerity. Like I'm just I'm I'm just showing you what like he's just introducing you to something. He's not marketing to you. And that sincerity and that transparency, I think resonates with consumers.

Whenever he posts something, whether it's an ad he did from MNTN or ads he's done with one of our customers, the comments always say, I don't understand why I enjoy Ryan Reynolds, like having me watch his ads so much. And it's like, Yeah, because they're just because he's not marketing to you. He's just being himself. It's just being himself. And that's going back to why

we acquired Maximum Effort and swing back to like Web3 and stuff like that. It was to so many of our customers, were new to TV advertising and Maximum Effort like kind of shows that like you don't need a half a million dollars to get its TV ad like you don't fit. It can be something that was literally created over a weekend because Maximum Effort has done that multiple times. So and just giving a vehicle for emerging brands, larger brands

to be able to do fast advertising on this new fast self-serve medium on the Web3 I think there's definitely going to be it's hard to predict the future. But I you know, one thing that's easy to predict wherever consumers go, brands, companies will follow. The consumers are more in control and they realize that brands are following you're they're following your journey. You're not following their journey. That can be 30, 40 years ago.

Maybe you were following their journey because you were getting marketed to, and you had No choice you didn't have. It was. Like. Exactly. Yeah. But now they're just following you wherever you go and, you know, and take advantage of it. I think consumers right now, I know we're jumping around topics. No. They're making themselves way too hard to find. Well. That was my next question, though. Yes, we have more information than we've ever had. And some would argue maybe we're less informed

than we've been. Yeah. And there's this kind of opposite side of what what we just said certainly is better to have more choice. Also, the research says when people have too much choice, they don't know what choice to make. Right. So how do you think how do we operate that? And I got a couple of rapid fire questions I want to get to you.

Yeah. Why in terms of the one part of that, when you have to make choices since the pandemic, I kind of live everywhere because I can't decide where I want to live because you know when you go into the office. Right. I'm actually in Newport, Rhode Island, right now of all places.

Okay. Enjoying Newport in the summer? No chance that I was going to be here if, you know, two years ago, because I'm like, I can't decide where to go, so I'm going to go someplace I've never been. But the consumer is going back to the consumer journey. And I think for consumers, what they don't realize is one of the dominant costs of every product you buy is, is the cost of buying you as a consumer.

This is why once you buy from a company of like 25% off emails because they no longer have to pay to market they don't have to they don't have to pay all this cost to connect with you anymore. So you as a consumer, if you make yourself easy to find, you will literally save money. Like I'll give you a really concrete example. If you pay $800. Let's say you go online. That is. Fascinating thought.

Yeah. They if you go online to buy a matress and let's say a matress costs, you know, $800, $600, at least 40% of the cost of that mattress was finding out that you were moving. Mm. If you just literally said hey I'm moving made yourself easy to identify those companies would gladly give you 25% off but they, you know once they spent expended all these dollars.

Yeah. To to connect with you like that money is sunk costs and you have to unfortunately we as consumers pay it this idea I'm a little being a little esoteric now the idea that companies pay anything companies pay nothing, consumers pay everything. That's how it works There's nothing a company pays for. Consumers pay everything. The company just turns what the consumer paid into. I got to buy marketing, I got to buy production, I got to buy HR you know, stuff, stuff like that.

So I think consumers are when I say easy to find. I think a lot of the privacy debates right now are are a little irrational. And they're just they're just raising the cost of the products that everyone buys. So we could do a whole topic. I mean, that's a fascinating point of view that you make. And it's and it's when people talk about Web3 part of the I think the narrative is like everybody's going to own their own data, which is the powerful, powerful part of it to some folks.

The powerful part I see is that creatives and people that are making content can have another way to monetize and kind of co-create with their fans. But data still is data like it's blockchain is a ledger. People can follow data. We can figure that part out too. Like it's it's like just because it's on a blockchain, it doesn't mean you can't see what's happening. You literally can. Yeah. In a world where you own your own data, I would sell all of mine and just.

Not that your biased and I'd buy products for less I feel like here's who I am this is where I currently reside. This is what I'm currently interested in.

This is what I'm currently doing whoever gives me product offers a good products at the cheapest prices is who I'm going to buy for and I'm making it easy to make that decision that like, like I would own the data but then release it because like, I don't know it's not a big secret that like I need to whatever that I want to buy clothes today, like with how I that's not something. I tend to agree with you. Yeah. Because I believe people want their lives to be easier and enjoy the trade off.

What I the only point I would make is that there just needs to be informed consent. Like it needs to be clear about what you're disclosing. And I think and I think most people will say yes because they want the trade off of the things you just said they want. Yeah, they want access to their product. They want to know they want Spotify to know and understand their favorite songs. So they can listen to it. I've heard people say they love Spotify.

It can read their mind and they think of it some people as a little creepy. But if we're honest, people like not having to think about those things they like. They like that. I mean, it's the vast majority. There are some that don't, but they tend to be the outliers in the mass. So that's a really good point. My single biggest complaint about Spotify is how come I don't know when there's concerts for the artists, you know, I'm listening and you know, I'm listening to them.

But somehow how come I'm not getting alerted that that artist is touring Well, I'm going to help you with that. That's exactly what Disrupt Art's about we'll an offline conversation about that this is that's the whole point of this like I think I think they have a model that I think works for mass consumption. But then for the superfans and others, that really want to know about a more intimate experience. Then there's a there's an audience for that.

But I don't think from I don't think Web3 is replacing all of Web2 I think people like the distribution model of getting to be able to listen to their favorite song and understand it. But I also think people want to know what you just said. Oh, here's my favorite artist. Can I do something to learn about alerts coming in and tying those two together? I think it's very, very powerful. Okay. A couple of quick rounds. I want to talk to you briefly after this. All right.

The future of advertising and media is just one sentence completed You caught me off guard with that the future of advertising and media is definitely more immersive, definitely more in the near term, less it's 1 to 1. But in the long term, I think it's definitely more 1 to 1 for the reasons we've been talking about. So it's very personalized. All right. One slogan that describes your business or who you are personally, what with that slogan, be. The hardest working software in advertising.

So that's our tagline right now. But they also like just empowering the marketer to finally fully have access to television. And what's your personal slogan? Wow, the ambition, trust and ambition, that that's a culture I've created in my company. It's just all about trusting everyone. that's a part of the team and but still combining that with a lot of ambition. And that's my personal like kind of credo, I guess you could say. Mark Douglass, CEO of MNTN, it's a pleasure having you on.

Disruption Now. Definitely don't make yourself a stranger. Thanks.