MNTN Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Record Profitability and AI-Driven Growth Accelerate

Moderator: I will now hand the conference over to Brinlea Johnson. Please go ahead.

Brinlea Johnson, Investor Relations, MNTN: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for MNTN’s first quarter 2026 earnings call. With me today is Mark Douglas, CEO, and Patrick Pohlen, CFO. Just to remind everyone, today’s call includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results can materially differ from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. For the risks and uncertainties that may affect future results, please see our most recently filed periodic report, which is also available on our website. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures on today’s call. Reconciliations of these measures are available in our earnings materials on our website. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Mark. Please go ahead.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Thank you for joining us today. MNTN reported strong financial results, delivering first quarter revenue growth of 25% year-over-year, along with strong adjusted EBITDA growth of 74% year-over-year, and record positive net income. Before we get into numbers, I wanna take a step back and remind everyone about MNTN’s unique value proposition in the connected TV market, and then discuss our future priorities that continue to position MNTN for a long runway and durable growth. I’ve said this many times. I founded MNTN with the mission to democratize television advertising. Democratizing TV means bringing any size brand from emerging e-commerce companies to category leaders to the most exciting storytelling medium in the world, the TV in your home. Doing this for one reason, to enable emerging organizations to grow their business and drive incremental revenue.

These brands wanna reach very specific consumers alongside content that not only performs well, but elevates their brand, and they want that investment to be measurable from the start. That’s performance marketing applied to television. It’s simple. Choose your budget, your audience, your goals, and upload your creative. Everything is automated from targeting the optimization, bringing digital marketing precision and accountability to streaming TV. AI plays an ever-expanding role in that automation, but we’re using AI in creative too. QuickFrame AI, our AI-powered creative video platform, was released from beta this morning and has become one of the fastest-growing elements in the MNTN suite. Our customers benefit from using QuickFrame AI as it combines AI video generation with professional-grade creative controls, so teams can produce polished videos easily, iterate continuously, and go live quickly. The latest release, QuickFrame AI 3.0, brings a major expansion of capabilities.

This update includes savable characters, a new storyboard editor, collaborative editing, and more. It continues to evolve as a creative platform designed to accelerate creative output and bring more campaigns to market with less friction. MNTN has consistently led through product innovation. We’ve been first in Performance TV in a number of innovations that directly impact our customers. That includes the first brand direct self-serve platform for television, the first company to bring performance advertising to connected TV, the first to provide AI targeting for connected TV, and the first to provide creative AI tools that can create TV commercials in minutes. We’ll continue to innovate and expand our AI capabilities with several new features already in customer beta and moving towards broader release. We also recently announced the addition of Garland Hill as MNTN’s chief revenue officer and Peter Blacker as head of content.

Garland was previously head of growth at TikTok. He launched that team from scratch to over 1,000 people and billions in revenue. Prior to TikTok, Garland led the CPG sales team at Meta. No one is better suited to lead and continue to build MNTN’s revenue. Peter Blacker’s previous role was head of streaming at NBCUniversal, where he built NBC’s streaming division. Television has the best content in the world, and Peter’s role at MNTN is to ensure MNTN provides our customers access to nearly all of that content. In Q1, we provided our customers access to performance advertising across nearly all streaming networks, including advertising on March Madness, the NHL playoffs, Major League Baseball, reality content like Housewives, The Traitors, and more. We have even more exciting content continuing to roll out due to Peter’s efforts.

Together, they fortify two key areas of our growth strategy, scaling revenue, and continued access to the best TV content available. Looking ahead, our priorities are clear. First, continue to attract new customers. We’re very focused on bringing new customers onto our platform and actively expanding our footprint in the SMB market. We’re executing on a massive opportunity and a TAM that we created, having successfully transformed TV into a measurable performance-driven advertising channel. Second, innovate and launch new products. We continue to invest in R&D and have a strong product pipeline positioned to capitalize on this market. As of today, over 50% of MNTN’s headcount is engineering, which we believe is the highest in our industry. Third, leverage AI. AI is an enabler to our business to both improve our product innovation and to become more efficient in our own operations to drive margin expansion.

Finally, accelerate our go-to-market. We are investing in sales and partnerships to broaden distribution and reach more customers. MNTN is helping a whole new generation of marketers unlock the full potential of television as a performance channel. With solid customer growth, continued innovation across our platform, and expanding margins, MNTN is well-positioned for sustained growth and profitability. Now I’ll turn it over to Patrick.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Thank you, Mark. We reported strong first quarter results to start the year, exceeding our prior revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance. Our solid performance reflects continued customer adoption of Performance TV, particularly by companies that had not previously advertised on television. Our first quarter revenue increased to $73.7 million, up 25% year-over-year after adjusting for the divestiture of Maximum Effort on April 1, 2025. To note, this will be the last quarter where we report revenue excluding Maximum Effort. We again included a table in our press release and also in our investor presentation that breaks out our revenue growth and gross margin over the past several quarters, both including and excluding the prior year’s contribution from Maximum Effort. First quarter gross margins improved to 81%, up 1,220 basis points over the prior year period.

Our core PTV business improved over 980 basis points, with the balance coming from the impact of the Maximum Effort divestiture, as well as a full quarter of reduced hosting costs. As you can see from the table in our earnings release, at the end of Q1, we had 3,874 active PTV customers when measured over the trailing 12 months. On a year-over-year basis, this represents growth of 46%. It’s worth reiterating that the number of active PTV customers we bring onto the platform is entirely within our control and is predominantly a function of how firmly we step on the accelerator to move down market. Our intent is to regularly evaluate and adjust our efforts to ensure that we are onboarding clients that have strong product market fit and a likelihood of succeeding on our platform.

As a result, this number will bounce around from quarter to quarter. Our expansion rate, which measures the spend of our current customers as compared to those same customers’ spend a year ago, is quite healthy and remains well north of 115%, continuously demonstrating that when our customers achieve their desired returns on advertising spend, they continue to increase their budgets with us. Total operating expenses for the first quarter were $50.4 million. For the first quarter, we achieved positive net income of $8.8 million for a GAAP EPS of $0.12. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $16.3 million, up from $9.4 million in Q1 of 2025, an increase of 74%.

The company’s adjusted EBITDA margin grew to 22.2%, up 770 basis points compared to 14.5% in Q1 of 2025. The improvement was driven by increased revenue and gross margin expansion and demonstrates the leverage inherent in our model. Although we are committed to gradually delivering operating leverage, our primary focus is on pursuing strong growth rather than maximizing our margins. Accordingly, we will continue to aggressively and strategically invest in sales and marketing to drive penetration into this nascent but large market opportunity. This may cause our EBITDA margins to bounce around from quarter to quarter, as the timing of our investments may not always match the slope of our revenue growth. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we ended the quarter at $215 million in cash and cash equivalents with no borrowings outstanding.

We ended the quarter with 73.9 million shares outstanding. Looking ahead, we remain confident in our momentum and the underlying health of our business. For Q2 2026, we expect revenue in the range of $81 million-$83 million, representing 20% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of $82 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $19 million and $22 million, reflecting continued leverage as we scale the business while continuing to remain disciplined in our investments. For the full year 2026, we are raising our revenue guidance to the range of $347 million-$357 million, representing over 24% year-over-year growth at the midpoint of $352 million when normalizing for the effect of the divestiture of Maximum Effort. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $96 million and $101 million.

To wrap up, we delivered another solid quarter and believe MNTN will continue to gain market share in the massive performance television market. We are confident that our future growth initiatives and the strength of our operating model will position MNTN to drive continued growth and profitability. With that, we’ll open up the line for questions.

Moderator: We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please use the raise your hand function. If you have dialed into today’s call, please press star nine to raise your hand and star six to unmute. Please stand by as we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from Shyam Patil of Susquehanna. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James1: Hey, guys. Congrats on the continued strong execution and results. Mark, I had one question for you. You mentioned in your script that the company has made some pretty significant hires with some very strong backgrounds in this space. Can you just talk a little bit more about this and maybe what you’re envisioning? Thank you.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Thanks for the question. What we’re seeing is that we think the market that essentially we created, which is the concept of Performance TV and bringing television to the small and midsize business sector, that that market is starting to move kind of early adopter to mainstream. We made added these individuals to the team, Garland Hill, Peter Blacker, and they of course are also adding people to the teams, their teams that they’re building out in the company in order to kind of meet that mainstream market head-on. Garland in particular, you know, he has been involved in significant build-outs in the performance marketing space, so I think his experience, his knowledge, his skills, and his network are incredibly valuable to the company. Same with Peter in turn.

He was there day one, building out streaming at NBCUniversal, kind of building out that team and that whole concept for NBCUniversal and Peacock. I’m pretty excited about these individuals, them being on the team, the people they’re gonna bring, and, I’m excited for, you know, kinda as the year unfolds and, we see the market kinda going, like I said, moving from that early adopter phase into kind of the mainstream segment where, every company starts to expect that, you know, they can be on television as part of their marketing mix. Thanks.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James1: Thanks, Mark.

Moderator: Your next question comes from the line of Ronald Josey with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James0: Great. Thanks for taking the question. Mark, I wanted to ask about your streaming partners and just with the addition of more and more tentpole events like March Madness, NHL playoffs, and obviously the hire of Peter. Just talk to us how your partnerships have evolved here and how your partners are viewing you as an additional source of monetization. Anything’s changed here or perhaps accelerated? Then I wanted to ask, of course, on QuickFrame AI 3.0, you know, clearly with we’re now on version 3 after having been in beta for only maybe since the fall. Just talk to us how the sales cycles have been post QuickFrame, how conversion rates, anything along those lines. Thank you.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Sure. Well, I’m sorry. I got caught off in the question.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James0: Streaming partners evolution.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Oh, streaming partners.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James0: Streaming partners evolution, tentpole events.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah. Sorry about that. I started thinking about the QuickFrame question. I think what’s really critical here is that in order for performance marketing to work, you have to reach the consumer where they are, right? Meaning that you can’t pick a network and maybe some of the people that you wanna reach are watching. You need to reach everyone that’s within the target group of consumers that you’re going after. We previously have built out relationships with virtually every streaming network in America. As the overall connected TV space has brought on things like live sports, like you said, tentpole events like the Oscars, as those have come to streaming, we think it’s important that we be bringing our customers to those events also. Bringing Peter on, he would, you know, obviously this year NBC is, like, covering virtually everything.

They have the Olympics. I think the World Cup. Just his experience and knowledge in terms of how that content plays out with all the relationships that we already have with these networks as well as he has, we just thought that that was a role where we wanted someone with just tremendous experience in this industry to be making sure that MNTN is giving our customers access to everything. In terms of relation with networks, I believe they view us as a growth channel. Now, I’ve said this stat many times before, 95% of our customers have never advertised on television before, that’s net new revenue in the industry, that means to MNTN and to our partners.

This is his role is just a really important part of wherever the consumer, that target consumer is, MNTN is there, and we’re bringing our customers there with us. In terms of the comment or the question about QuickFrame AI, the product is new. We want it to really work. We’re going after not just video clips, full-blown professional quality commercials. We did a long beta. We’ve had many, many companies use QuickFrame AI and continue to use QuickFrame, and we thought with this version 3, this was really fully ready for anyone to use, and we’re really excited. The team is excited, and we’re excited with the commercials that people are building in the product and that they’re going to continue to build.

In terms of a question about the sales cycle for QuickFrame AI, currently that we, you know, most of our younger customers, or I guess you could say small businesses, are in some way using QuickFrame AI, and so we’re excited about that. We’re not really measuring in terms of length of sales cycle. We’re measuring it more in terms of the, you know, how quickly can companies get live and can they keep refreshing their creative over and over and over again after they’re live. Those are stats we’re looking at. We’re excited about where that’s headed.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James0: Thank you, Mark. Very helpful.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Thanks.

Moderator: Your next question comes from Andrew Boone with Citizens. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Boone, Analyst, Citizens: Thanks so much for taking the questions. I’d like to start off in terms of guidance. The full year guide implies just an acceleration in the back half. Can you guys either explain that to us?

Talk to us about the confidence you have to be able to achieve that. Patrick, I think in your comments earlier, you talked about throttling new customers in terms of onboarding. Can you just talk to us in terms of how you guys think about the pacing of onboarding customers and what may be a good fit for the platform versus when may not be? Just help us understand the dynamics of what you guys are looking for in terms of customer adds. Thanks so much.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Sure. I’ll take the first one, and Mark and I may share the second one, Andrew. We continue to see a lot of strength in the PTV business, and that’s indicated in both our Q2 guide and our fiscal year guide. We anticipate continued growth in revenue and adjusted EBITDA and see long runway of growth ahead of us. The Q2 guide is $81 million-$83 million, $82 million at the midpoint, 20% year-over-year growth. The fiscal year guide is $347 million-$357 million, 24% growth at the midpoint. We continue to invest strategically in things that will drive revenue growth, particularly in sales and marketing, and we also have initiatives that, as you know, to continue to improve our gross margins.

The combination of strong customer and revenue growth, gross margin strength, disciplined investment to drive more revenue, we think sets us up very nicely for the future.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: In terms of the second question, I think I can start to address that. I think the way you should think about it, or the way we think about it is you have small business and what we call mid-market. One of the lines of distinction is the size of the business, but an even more important line of distinction is, as companies get larger, they have dedicated marketing teams, and those teams have basically very specific needs. In our platform, we initially focused on the needs of those mid-market customers. Small business, smaller businesses tend to be, and often more, you know, kind of owner-led, own, owner-controlled. You have individuals in the company handling a lot of the marketing who maybe not as developed a marketing skill set, so we essentially see those as different.

The needs, the core platform are the same, but some of the needs of the platform are different. Our mid-market has been consistently growing the entire time, you know, since we launched version one of the, you know, kind of the concept of Performance TV. We see the small business as something where, you know, we wanna make sure they come on, they’re successful, our cost to acquire them is where we want it to be, and that they have long and sustained growth. Each quarter or really each month, if not even each day, we are making adjustments in terms of how much small business we’re driving towards, what, you know, adjustments to the product, to the reporting and things like that.

When Patrick says we control it, what he means is we control the marketing investment in acquiring those customers, we control whether they come on board in terms of product minimums, and we wanna make sure that the, you know, we continue obviously our success in mid-market, but we also are bringing on small business at a sustainable and responsible and profitable rate. That’s why that part of our business, we kinda take up and make adjustments to in order to kinda really land that exactly where we want it. That will continue to evolve over the course of the year and beyond.

It’s something that it’s one of the most important topics in the company, ’cause to realize our full vision, we want, you know, all businesses to have access to it, but with the right feature set, the right price point, and something that we’re constantly evolving and we have dedicated teams on.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: We did grow 46% year-over-year.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah, in terms of customer growth.

Moderator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Robert Coolbrith with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Robert Coolbrith, Analyst, Evercore ISI: Hi, everybody. This is Rob on the call from Mark. Thanks for the opportunity to ask a question. Wanted to ask two, if we could. First, you know, just wanted to maybe follow up on the QuickFrame question. Are there any benefits you’re seeing in the beta period that, you know, are giving you more confidence in the go-live times, the creative refresh and, you know, sort of matching up the product, you know, with where it needs to be for customers to have success, especially as you go down-market on the SMB? Just wonder, you know, does that give you any additional confidence, you know, Patrick, to invest incrementally or, you know, press a little bit harder on the accelerator to use that metaphor?

Secondarily, the gross margin, you know, came in, I think, a fair amount better than we expected. Any particular levers that you pulled in the quarter, you know, that you’d maybe like to call out? Thank you.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Sure. Mark and I will share the first one. In terms of, your question was again, Rob?

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Are there any benefits we’re seeing?

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Yeah.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Rob-

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Why don’t you do the anecdotal benefits, Mark?

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah. I think in terms of QuickFrame AI, why is version 3 the version that we’re now calling full production? We did, you know, we basically announced that today. You’ll see more in terms of marketing. It’s essentially we’ve been literally watching customers use the product, looking at their rates of starting projects, getting them live, how much time it’s taking them, and we felt we were really pleased with where those metrics were getting to, and kind of our ability to scale that and just kind of the knowledge that people needed to have to do it. We’ve kind of brought the effort down, the go-live rates up in terms of QuickFrame AI. We were seeing that people with less creative skills were increasingly more successful. Part of that is the investment technology we made.

Now you can have savable characters, which is like casting inside, you know, AI casting, essentially. Savable locations, you can pick products you want in the video. That functionality. Part of it is that the AI generative models just keep getting better. We’re integrated with all of the best models. Sora, Kling, you know, Gemini V, Veo from Google and other models. Like that inflection point, it’s hard to remember, but literally last March you could not create a usable AI video. We’re just a little over a year later, and, like, the evolution of these models, as well as the evolution of us orchestrating them to create professional-grade videos just reached a point.

In terms of the benefit to our, you know, sales cycle or go-live times and things like that, we’re definitely seeing benefits there in terms of small business, mainly because there’s no approvals involved. Like, the person can come on, create an account, create the video and go live. In the mid-market segment there tend to be a few more approvals involved. There may be professional video people involved. We’re seeing some improvement there, but the improvement on the small business sizes side is pretty significant. Well, you know. I don’t think we’re ready to exactly, you know, provide those numbers, but we’re really excited about the release that went production today.

Like, really enthused about what this is gonna mean for customers and where that, you know, the metrics are headed in terms of QuickFrame and the resulting impact on MNTN.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Rob, in terms of the cost, I think we have enough anecdotal evidence that it is what we thought it would be, which is an enabler to our core PTV business, particularly in small, but also we see a lot of mid-size customers using it. The cost is, we haven’t quantified it yet because we just came out of beta, but the cost we’re managing, I think, quite well. It’s worth what we’re seeing in terms of enabling both mid-size customers and small businesses to get TV commercials to get on the platform. I think as we now, with it sort of released, generally I think we will start to track that more. We’ve never really built it necessarily for a revenue stream, but rather to enable the core PTV business.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Then Patrick, anything I, you can just call out on gross margin.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Yeah

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: making it a little bit better? Thank you.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: Yeah, sure. You know, we had a nice quarter in terms of gross margin at 81%. Again, that is a mix of strong revenue growth, ’cause revenue growth drives gross margin improvement. We also, you know, we got rid of Maximum Effort. We spun them out, and that gives us a huge benefit in terms of the creative cog. We spun them out, and that gives us a huge benefit in terms of the creative cog. Similarly, for Q1, we had the full benefit of the switch of hosting providers. I think the combination of that is actually quite strong. We think that will continue into the future.

We think the combination of revenue growth driving gross margin, the creative cog, the hosting cog, and the other cogs, having discipline around them will put us, you know, squarely in a position to stay in the long-term target of 75%-80%.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: All right. Thank you.

Moderator: Your next question comes from Matt Weber with Canaccord. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Matt Weber, Analyst, Canaccord: Hi. Thanks so much for taking the question, and congrats on the strong quarter. Just as we think about the broader macro backdrop, how would you describe the health of your SMB advertiser base over the past few months? Have you noticed any changes in budget pacing or campaign duration that might reflect a tighter discretionary spending environment? Are large enterprise customers behaving any differently?

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah. In terms of the macro for the SMB sector, I don’t really think they’re greatly affected by macro unless it’s very, very difficult circumstances. I mean, you can look back to COVID where literally, like, just essentially all business nearly stopped, and that was one of the biggest years we had and many other companies in the performance advertising space had. That’s because SMB customer companies, you know, emerging companies, in difficult environments, they don’t lose their ambition. If anything, they are more determined to grow in order to outpace their competitors. We’re not seeing any meaningful impact, I would say nearly zero impact from macro concerns or anything to that effect.

In the enterprise space, if you mean, like, truly large global brands, that’s not really a part of MNTN’s business. You know, I would look to other companies to kind of answer that question. In the SMB market we are seeing full speed ahead in terms of our customers. Macro is not mentioned. It’s not something where they’re coming to us and saying like, "Oh, because the concerns over," you know, whatever macro concern of the day there is, you know, "We’re pulling back spend." It’s just not a conversation. They are entirely focused on return on ad spend and hitting, you know, their gross, down to the individual who often has personal bonuses tied to hitting metrics and things like that.

In a metrics-focused business like they are in and we are in, you know, these are not generally, you know, things that we’ve had to deal with.

Matt Weber, Analyst, Canaccord: Gotcha. That’s, that’s a great answer. I like that answer. Just as a quick follow-up, switching gears, is there any update you can share on your media planning tool, when you’re targeting to bring that to market? Anything you can share in terms of the key points of differentiation versus existing solutions that are in market today? Thanks so much.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: I was joking to some people today that I’m obviously not Steve Jobs, but I usually have one more thing. I definitely am a product guy. You’ll be hearing more about that very soon. We think it’s another exciting development in terms of AI technology from MNTN. It’s with customers. We’re getting very positive reviews on it. I have a tendency to talk about things before they’re fully released in production, you remembered and that is something that I’m pretty excited about and you’ll be hearing more about soon.

Moderator: Your next question comes from Andrew Marok with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Andrew Marok, Analyst, Raymond James: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe two, please. First, if we could talk a little bit about the recent Pinterest announcements that they’re doing with tvScientific, just kinda how that affects the broader Performance TV space and you in particular. Second, given what you mentioned and what you’ve seen out of events in Q1, like March Madness and the pro playoffs, how are you thinking about a World Cup boost as we get into the summer months? Thank you.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Sure. First in terms of question about Pinterest and TV Scientific, I think what At one time, TV Scientific was a, you know, kind of a company that was trying to, I think, kinda copy MNTN in terms of concept of Performance TV. I think Pinterest interest in them was driven because they have a lot of data, and they wanted to find more ways to monetize it, that makes sense for them. We’re not seeing that as, you know, kinda competitive in terms of we run into TV Scientific in sales cycles or anything like that. I think that’s, you know, again, a way for, you know, Pinterest to kind of find more ways to monetize the data that they get from people using Pinterest, not competitive to MNTN.

In terms of the World Cup, it’s a massive event, especially the fact that it’s in the U.S. this year. The MNTN is making World Cup available to our customers. One thing I wanna remind though, our customers are always focused on return on ad spend first. We think, I’ve said many times, you know, television has the best content in the world. We think it’s important our customers be on all of that we think wherever the consumer is watching, if it’s the target consumer for a brand on MNTN’s platform, we wanna be there too. The spend on our platform is ultimately not driven by the television content, meaning, like, not a specific event like World Cup.

It’s driven by the return on ad spend, and you get that by being on all available content, including content like the World Cup. We would definitely be there, but it’s not something that is, like, a separate line item or separate, you know, like effects or guidance or for, you know, or internal forecast or anything like that.

Moderator: Your next question comes from Rob Sanderson with Loop Capital.

Rob Sanderson, Analyst, Loop Capital: Yeah. Thanks for the reminder. The first time user on this mute button. Sorry for that, but good afternoon, thanks for taking my question. I wanna talk about your go-to-market evolution. You know, the past few years, your business has really been driven by inbound leads and like 90% plus of new customers. But you’ve expanded the sales force quite meaningfully recently and seem to be focusing a little bit more on developing agency relationships. Can you talk two things, Mark? Maybe, you know, speak to how these efforts are going so far. You know, when do you expect to see more sort of fruits of those efforts? I know it takes a little time to build.

You know, are these, like, direct sales and agencies, would this be kind of incremental to inbound, or are you kind of shifting the mix deliberately somehow? You know, you know, any notable margin implications as the mix changes?

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah, in terms of go-to-market, I think that speaks to my point about, excuse me, my earlier point about the market going kind of early adopter to mainstream. The agencies that MNTN works with are generally performance agencies. They’re not like a WPP or a Publicis. They’re independent agencies that built their businesses around paid search, then paid social, and now see Performance TV as a new opportunity for them, and we wanna be there to power that opportunity and to help them grow and to help them build their business. That’s not necessarily a shift in our strategy. More than 90% of Performance TV advertisers don’t use an agency.

There’s no opportunity even if we wanted to shift it, you can’t because you have to go where the customers are, and the vast majority of performance advertisers are direct. They’re direct users in our platform and other performance platforms like the Meta ad platform. But there is a portion of the market, a sizable portion, you know, 10%, and that tends to be larger, mid-size brands who do use agencies. We think that’s great. We wanna be a great partner to them and vice versa. We’re being that. We started, I mentioned on previous earnings calls, and I think we did a press release last year, that agency was one of the faster-growing segments for us.

We continue to see that as a big opportunity, that is part of, with Garland Hill coming on as Chief Revenue Officer, how he’s shaping his organization is around making sure we have coverage wherever there’s opportunity, both direct to brand and, you know, via agencies to brand. In terms of how that shifts our mix, we ultimately count the brands. We see the agencies as a 1 to many opportunity, meaning that 1 agency can bring many customers. We still ultimately look at it as what’s the number of brands that we’re working with. They are ultimately the financially responsible party and the final decision and the decision-maker on use of our platform.

The it always at some point goes back to the brand, even with agencies, you know, being an important part of that, relationship in those instances.

Rob Sanderson, Analyst, Loop Capital: The direct sales expansion?

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah, the direct sales, I think, like you said, it’s a bit early. We have no concerns there. We know, you know, we think the opportunity is large, there’s more than enough room to continue to expand our sales organization to meet it head-on. Like you said, that takes a bit of time, you know, to fully cement and, you know, kind of like those individuals become fully productive. We’re pleased with where that’s headed, that’s something that we view as a pretty low-risk investment that we’re making.

Rob Sanderson, Analyst, Loop Capital: Yeah.

Patrick Pohlen, Chief Financial Officer, MNTN: In terms of margin, Rob, I mean, as you’ve seen, you know, our model has a lot of natural leverage in it. I don’t think it will have an impact on our bottom line margin.

Rob Sanderson, Analyst, Loop Capital: Okay, great. If I could do another on just the competitive sort of dynamic and some of the sustainability factors. Like, you know, larger players are all aspiring to move down market and focus more on SMBs, and that’s, you know, Amazon and Roku, and AppLovin’s gonna do more here, and Trade Desk eventually maybe aspires to serve smaller customers. You know, what do you think the sort of some of the more common misperceptions you think investors have about your competitive differentiation and, you know, just what are the most durable elements of your competitive moat?

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah. To answer your question, we are purpose-built for the SMB market. Let’s talk about some of the differences. The targeting is incredibly important because the smaller the business, the smaller the target pool of customers. Instead of you trying to reach, you know, millions of consumers in the U.S., these are businesses that are often trying to reach thousands. When you’re spending money on Performance TV like this, you have to have incredibly pinpoint targeting, which is why it was so important that we started leveraging AI technology really early as part of our targeting engine. They don’t have TV ads when we meet them. 95 out of 100 companies that come to mntn.com, at least 95, might even be higher, don’t have a television ad when they visit our website.

They don’t have the budget to go get production crews, so we’ve addressed that. Even the way we buy ads, our programmatic bidding engine is purpose-built to respond to signals on performance and alter the ad buy in order to buy the right media. We talked a little earlier about media planning. Like all of these things are purpose-built for the SMB market plus more, giving the customer a single solution that addresses all their needs across nearly every streaming network in America, gets them on premium content, not remnant content, and gets consumers to respond to these ads. There’s a final thing, the go-to-market motion. If you have a sales team built around large enterprise customers, getting that team to wanna go after small businesses is nearly impossible.

You have to essentially build a whole other sales organization, marketing organization, drive more traffic to your brand to get them to sign up. All of these things have to be built out. I respect the efforts of other companies. I think it, like I basically, it’s a big validator of the scale of the opportunity if Roku, if The Trade Desk or others see this as, you know, in the future a potential area to go after. We’re also not standing still.

We’re moving forward, capturing more of the opportunity and, you know, again, you can’t just take an enterprise go-to-market motion and enterprise technology and just kinda say, "Now let’s offer it to small businesses." You have to kind of build a whole new organization and technology platform for the small businesses, and we think that’s something we’ve already done, we’re really good at, and we never stand still in doing, which is why, you know, more than half of MNTN is engineers, software engineers working at the company. We’re excited about that.

Rob Sanderson, Analyst, Loop Capital: Thanks for all that. Thanks, Mark.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Cool.

Moderator: Your next question comes from Laura Martin with Needham. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: Hi there. I sort of, like, so I wanna talk about orchestration. You’ve talked in the past about orchestration, and what’s interesting is you were first on that, but that is what Amazon is saying that they’re seeing on their Bedrock platform, is that almost all companies are using multiple AI LLMs. I’m wondering if you have any move forward in being an orchestration layer? A. Then on the competitive landscape, sort of building on that last question, you know, one of the things we’re hearing from other companies is that everybody’s getting into omni-channel performance, that they’re adding connected TV because they were in the open internet, which is threatened by chatbots. My question to you is: Is there some competitive advantage for you guys of not being omni-channel and just being performance CTV? Thank you.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Yeah, sure. I think in terms of the first question, orchestration, when I’m using that’s primarily in the context of the creative, although it definitely can apply in any area. I think at the end of the day, what it means is using the best-of-breed LLM or generative AI capabilities or generative capabilities for whatever the specific task and content of that task is. When it comes to creative 30-second TV commercial or even starting to be longer, that can mean different scenes in a commercial might be using different basic LLMs. In other words, Sora might be in one, Veo in another. Some are better at showing products, some are better at having multiple talking actors.

In order to get to professional-quality video, you have to have a layer of technology that knows that and can orchestrate them, plus voiceovers, plus music and things like that. That’s something we recognized really early, and we built out a whole layer of technology to do, and we consider that part of a technology to be proprietary. It’s essentially using our own AI tech in order to do that. It’s a really important part. In terms of whether other people can do that, they better ’cause they’re not gonna be able to match the quality unless they do. I don’t think everyone’s gonna reach that level, but, you know, at some point we’re probably not gonna be the only ones that recognize that that’s needed.

You know, that’s just kinda normal cost of business. In terms of omni-channel, I think the biggest advantage we have that sometimes goes unspoken is we have the highest level of performance for TV. We have never been in a head-to-head test, just mano a mano, your performance against our performance, and we lost. Why is that? It’s ’cause we’ve been doing this longer. We built out models longer. We built out the programmatic ad stack built to drive outcomes. In our we see it right now that competitively being the highest level of performance for an area, in other words, if someone’s the highest level of performance for social, that maintaining that lead is a big part of their competitive advantage.

In our case, being the highest level of performance for streaming TV is a big competitive advantage. As to whether we should go omni-channel, I mean, I think, I wouldn’t say we’re not doing that right now. It’s something that I think about and I, you know, ultimately I’m gonna follow the customer. As to the customer, you know, is looking to basically just give a bag of money to one company and say, "Hey, you spend it, and, you know, let me know the results." Right now, I think it’s intriguing, but I don’t think it’s clear that that’s where I think some of the players in the ad space market wanna go, but I’m not sure the customers are fully on board.

We’ll see how that develops. I think it’s an interesting area that, you know, Laura, you know, we talk at conferences and things like that. I’m sure it’s an interesting area we’ll continue to talk about.

Laura Martin, Analyst, Needham: Thank you. Thanks very much.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: Sure.

Moderator: There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Mark for closing remarks.

Mark Douglas, Chief Executive Officer, MNTN: I will just say I thank everyone for their time. We’re happy with this quarter, and we’re excited about the rest of the year, so stay tuned and we’ll keep doing this. That’s it. Thanks, everyone.

Moderator: This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.