When MNTN (pronounced “Mountain”) acquired Ryan Reynolds’ creative ad shop Maximum Effort back in 2021, it undoubtedly hoped the actor and his team would help make a fun, persuasive case for its complex advertising technology. It’s hard enough for consumer brands to capture people’s attention, so it’s understandable that MNTN would see Reynolds’ star power as a way to give a little shine to its B2B ad tech firm.
Now, in a new ad, we see that shine brought to life. This week, MNTN is launching a new AI-powered product called MNTN Matched. And Reynolds, who is now MNTN’s chief creative officer, is there to break down the tech for us laypeople.
In the new spot for MNTN Matched, Reynolds sits with Bulova vice-president of marketing, Patty Schmoyer, to pitch her on Matched. Reynolds jokes as a voiceover describes Matched and how it works. It’s far from a Deadpool spot, and Schmoyer isn’t quite Steve-O eating a Carolina Reaper, but Reynolds is still able to use his charm and humor to help demystify this complicated technology.
How it works
The company says that instead of traditional targeting across broad demographics, Matched connects individual consumers on streaming TV with brands and products they are most likely to engage with and buy. What’s new is how it uses generative AI to learn about the brand to suggest better keyword terms to find the most receptive audience for its ads.
“Traditional TV advertising, including streaming, is still very much broadcast to large groups of people,” says MNTN president and CEO Mark Douglas. “Even with third-party data, the audiences are often tens of millions of households, out of approximately 140 million households in the U.S.”
There’s an old adage, attributed to Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker, that says marketers know they’re wasting half their ad budgets, the problem is they don’t know which half. “MNTN Matched fixes that old problem by matching consumers with brands and not wasting any of the ad spend,” says Douglas. “By matching, we are opening up TV advertising to millions of small to midsize businesses that have unique products or are building their own category.”
So how exactly does this new tool match brands with real people who are deemed most willing to buy or consider buying their products? Douglas says MNTN uses Generative AI to understand the advertiser and find the best way to find its audience. “The marketer is still very much involved, but now it’s like the generative AI is a team they hired to give them advice,” he says.
Matched gives brands recommended keywords to use in their existing self-serve ad targeting system based on that brand’s business and products, and explains why those keywords are recommended, much like with ads on search or social media. From there, consumers who fit those keywords are found, and ads are delivered on TV across any streaming network.
For example, the brand Onewheel has a very specific user of its single wheeled electric skateboard in mind for its ads. The company says the traditional options to target ads to TV audiences were limited. Choices like “Outdoor Enthusiast,” would includes bird-watchers, whereas with MNTN Matched they were able to target using keywords that made much more sense, like surfing. Douglas says their results were a 14-times increase in the number of visitors to their site from their ad campaign, and a 15-times increase in revenue.
It’s the type of technology that people are bound to interact with on a regular basis, even if they don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes. But then again, that’s what Reynolds is for.