00:00A different force is reshaping the industry. AI with ad tech firm Mountain posting strong results as it leans into
00:07that shift. For more on what's driving ad spending we're joined by the CEO of Mountain. It is Mark Douglas.
00:12And by the way Mark I hope you will join me in yelling at Matt for not being here for
00:15this interview because you know he loves talking to you for shame. Shame on him for not being here. I
00:19saw him last week. I'll definitely let him know. Perfect. Perfect. Mark I do wonder just you know if we're
00:25going to compare the results of Snap and Mountain. Yours are very strong led by AI but
00:29Snap flags basically less spending because of geopolitics. Are you seeing that anywhere any sort of Iran sentiment turnaround that's
00:37causing more cautiousness among companies. Well we're not and the reason why is we focus on the small and mid
00:43-sized businesses the SMB market and they you know they have a determination to grow that kind of outweighs whatever
00:51macro factors are happening in the world at any given time. So even in the worst of circumstances performance we
00:57do performance TV and the
00:59worst of circumstances performance marketing is strong. When you're dependent a bit more on large enterprise brands then you're going
01:06to be dependent also on you know macro factors changes in budgets like a whole set of factors that are
01:13out of your control. So I think you know for Snap it's understandable. For Mountain it's also understandable because we're
01:19focused on growing businesses.
01:21By the way just on that you're small and mid-sized businesses. On the results you noted that some of
01:28them are entering the television market for the first time. Mark I thought TV was dead and we just want
01:34to be on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. What's going on there?
01:37Well more people the people more people watch TV a day than do literally anything else in the world. Maybe
01:43other than eat dinner. Like yeah 5.1 billion people a day watch television on average for three hours and
01:51about 4 billion people a day use social media at one hour. So television remain people want to be entertained
01:58and when you go out to dinner for example do you talk about the you know the posts you saw
02:03on Instagram or do you talk about your favorite show on television.
02:06So television still is a huge medium for people. It's a dominant entertainment medium and it continues to grow and
02:13especially streaming television where we play.
02:15I don't know internet memes are discussed in my household but like the memes are watched for like 20 seconds
02:20and I don't see any ads with them. So maybe that's less useful than a long TV show.
02:23There's no season finale of the latest meme though and no there will be a few with the World Cup
02:29later this quarter.
02:31That's true. Wait Mark how is advertising looking around that around the World Cup?
02:37Oh I think we might have lost Mark. That's a shame. I wanted to know because me personally I feel
02:42like there's not enough World Cup stuff out there. I swear it's happening in New York City and you would
02:47have no idea. There's nothing out around there. I'm seeing basically no advertisements but maybe that's because everyone just focus
02:54on the playoffs now and go Knicks on that note.
02:56We'll see if we can get Mark back. But that was of course Mark Douglas the CEO and president of
03:00Mountain losing service in whatever beautiful location he was there.
03:04Oh Mark there you go. I thought maybe you had left us to go and enjoy the sun behind where
03:09you are.
03:10Before we before we had lost you I was just asking about the World Cup. How is advertising looking around
03:14around this big event?
03:16I think it's a massive event. It's been a year of big events you know kind of with the Olympics
03:21and obviously always the Super Bowl World Cup coming on.
03:25And I think you know advertisers are very excited about it. But again for Mountain customers it's more about the
03:31performance.
03:31The return on ad spend they get the you know lowering the cost per acquisition. But they want to be
03:37against the best content in the world.
03:39And this year the World Cup in the U.S. I think it's going to be just literally massive in
03:43the ad industry and in the television industry overall.
03:46So let's talk about the other big elephant for your business and that's AI. I know you've been rolling out
03:51your ad product.
03:52Last time you joined Matt and I you showed us an ad you made for open interest that was really
03:58really good.
03:58I won't say it's better than anything we made because you know I can't disappoint the team around us.
04:03But it was really good Mark. How is that rollout going? How is it being used?
04:07What sort of uptake are you seeing on your AI products?
04:10Yeah so just for backdrop I mean literally March of last year was almost impossible to create an AI video.
04:19And now like we're entering an era where like it's it's just been a massive shift forward.
04:26You have models like C-Dance, Vio and others.
04:29Mountain we orchestrate all those models to produce high quality professional video for our customers.
04:35And the results they're seeing are great.
04:37We announced Quick Frame. We call that tool Quick Frame.
04:39Quick Frame AI and we announced Quick Frame AI 3.0 on Tuesday.
04:44And we're really excited about it.
04:47I mean you can just create outstanding video and anyone can do it.
04:51A videographer down to a small business owner.
04:54And I think people are really really happy with the results.
04:57We're moving from like little clips now to really true professional video that incorporates AI technology to create it.
05:04Mark and these kinds of things though they you know take a lot of compute in order to do.
05:10There's a lot of inference going on.
05:12There's a lot of energy. I was really shocked last week that Uber basically said that it had exhausted its
05:18entire 2026 AI budget in just four months.
05:23Again due to how much they're using cloud code and other tools by their engineering teams.
05:27Mark I wonder if that registers as a concern at all.
05:30Well especially if you get the large language models starting to more pass on some of the inference costs.
05:36For now they're really low.
05:37At some point do we need to start worrying with just how expensive it is to be running all of
05:42these models?
05:43Well I think it largely depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
05:47So when you look at something like generating video, the cost to create a TV commercial where you hire a
05:53film crew, that's going to be $25,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
05:58So it kind of doesn't matter what the compute cost is.
06:02It's going to be lower than that.
06:03But if you're doing other tasks that are already relatively inexpensive but now you're using AI to do them faster,
06:10then the cost to compute is going to be kind of equal, maybe even more than the cost of what
06:16it costs to do it manually.
06:17So it really depends on what your costs are starting with that AI is now helping lower.
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