If you tuned into MNTN’s three quarterly earnings calls since going public in May, you’ve heard CEO and President Mark Douglas deliver the same elevator pitch three times – that the company is bringing performance-driven CTV advertising to small and midsize businesses.
And that’s a message Douglas plans to keep repeating, he told AdExchanger on Wednesday, the morning after MNTN’s fourth quarter earnings call.
“For any newly public company, just retelling the story is an important part of opening our earnings calls,” Douglas said. “The investor community has a lot of things they’re looking at, and it’s easy for them to forget some of the details.”
What investors are unlikely to miss, however, is MNTN’s recent performance, which appears to back up that story.
On Tuesday, MNTN reported that its fourth-quarter revenue grew 36% year over year to just over $87 million when adjusted for the Q2 divestiture of Maximum Effort, the digital marketing agency founded by Ryan Reynolds that MTN had acquired in 2021 to bolster its CTV advertising business.
Full-year revenue also grew 36% YOY, from $209.3 million in 2024 to $284.7 million last year.
Since reporting, MNTN’s stock price has skyrocketed, from $8.10 when the market closed on Tuesday to $10.90 on Thursday morning.
Resetting for Q1
Despite this growth, MNTN’s outlook for 2026 is fairly conservative, particularly for Q1. The company expects between $71.3 and $73.3 million in revenue for the first quarter, which only represents a YOY growth rate of roughly 22%.
The last time MNTN’s revenue grew less than 30% was in Q1 of 2024, back before the company actually went public. During that quarter, revenue only increased 17% on a year-over-year basis. (Still excluding the Maximum Effort divestiture, of course.)
Q1 tends to be slower for performance advertising companies across the board, Douglas said, and MNTN is no exception. The bulk of its client base consists of ecommerce and travel businesses, many of which generate up to 40% of their annual revenue during the fourth quarter, which includes the holidays, and treat Q1 as a time to reset.
And although 2026 is a major election year, politics is another area where MNTN is keeping its expectations in check.
Unlike other advertising platforms, MNTN isn’t anticipating a bump in midterm political spending, according to Douglas, because politics is all about brand-building, awareness and “blasting messages very broadly,” and MNTN focuses on performance-driven outcomes.
In contrast with other DSPs that emphasize low-cost reach, he said, MNTN prioritizes “pinpointing particular consumers” for its SMB clients. With that in mind, MNTN is developing its own AI-powered planning tools, which will use predictive algorithms to determine the best media placements and spend levels in real time.
Will AI kill the video star?
And MNTN also has big plans for QuickFrame AI, the AI video generation tool it built using technology acquired in 2022. MNTN beta launched the tool right before its Q3 earnings call in November.
Douglas told investors this week that adoption is already strong, with around 5,000 users and growing. But it’s still too soon to determine how well AI-generated CTV commercials perform compared to more traditional ones, he told AdExchanger.
Anecdotally, MNTN is seeing strong social engagement with its own AI-generated content experiments. The company is even hiring content creators and videographers to produce videos, with the goal of eventually posting new ones on a weekly basis.
Last week, for example, MNTN posted a QuickFrame-generated video to Instagram that features a “Heated Rivalry”-inspired hockey player decked out in MNTN branding (and, it should be noted, two different jersey numbers, a continuity error that would be less likely to occur during an actual film shoot).
According to Douglas, that post, which only cost roughly $500 to produce, racked up around 190,000 views and more than 2,200 likes, making it the company’s best-performing video not featuring Ryan Reynolds.
Of course, AI ads can also draw negative comments from users – one person, for example, posted a “Your AI slop bores me” meme below MNTN’s hockey video on Instagram – which raises the question: Should small businesses that use AI for their CTV ads be worried about the potential for backlash?
Although Douglas said he believes AI videos should be properly labeled as such, “so there’s never confusion,” he also feels that the fervor will die down once AI becomes less of a novelty.
“Often when there’s a new medium or new way of crafting any form of art, the medium becomes the point rather than the art,” said Douglas. “When we’re making AI the point, that backlash is actually valid, but I think it’ll find its home.”
