Home CTV MNTN Wants Its AI Video Ad Generator To Stand Apart From Its CTV Platform

MNTN Wants Its AI Video Ad Generator To Stand Apart From Its CTV Platform

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Tuesday was a big day for CTV platform MNTN.

In addition to posting its first quarter results for 2026, the company also announced the launch of QuickFrame AI 3.0, which CEO Mark Douglas revealed to investors on an earnings call that same day. The video tool’s new iteration allows users to generate multi-scene narratives and save characters, products and locations across different projects.

Since MNTN originally bought QuickFrame in January 2022, the brand has pivoted its business model from that a content production studio, to a maker community, and now an AI product.

But cheaper, easier video creation has always been the goal for QuickFrame, Douglas told AdExchanger on Wednesday after earnings. Bringing the cost of creative down leads to companies developing more creative, not less, he said – and the more creative those companies run over time, the better their campaigns perform.

Although QuickFrame AI is meant to enable MNTN’s target advertiser pool of small and mid-market businesses, it exists separately as its own monthly subscription cost, as opposed to a usage-based one (per Douglas, “No one likes tokens”). It also has a growing customer base of individual content creators, too, many of whom are developing ads for social media instead of television.

“We want the tool to win on its own merits, not just be a feature of the MNTN performance TV platform,” said Douglas.

A command performance

Speaking of which, MNTN’s core CTV advertising business is still growing rapidly, Tuesday’s earnings report also revealed.

Revenue for the first quarter of 2026 grew to $73.7 million, at a rate of 25% year-over-year (after adjusting for the divestiture of creative agency Maximum Effort in April last year – a caveat that will no longer be necessary in future reports).

MNTN also ended the quarter with a total of 3,874 active performance TV clients, representing 46% of YoY growth, CFO Patrick Pohlen told investors on Tuesday.

Moving forward, the company expects to generate 21% more revenue in 2026 than in 2025, with between $347 million and $357 million in annual revenue.

Debates about the feasibility of infinite growth aside, Douglas does not expect MNTN’s upward trajectory to slow anytime soon.

“You can see that in other parts of performance marketing,” Douglas told AdExchanger. “Advertising businesses tend to grow to become the biggest companies in each of their sectors.”

Social versus TV

During Tuesday’s earnings call, Douglas also fielded an investor question about what Pinterest’s recent foray into CTV advertising with newly acquired tvScientific might mean for the broader performance TV space.

Although tvScientific bills itself as a performance TV platform the same way MNTN does, Pinterest’s interest in the space has more to do with extending the reach of its own audience, rendering it “not competitive to MNTN,” Douglas answered.

Douglas later elaborated on his position to AdExchanger, saying that social-aligned digital platforms like Pinterest (and Meta, which might also be considering a similar foray into CTV) will not be able provide the same level of targeting and measurement tools as a full-service platform like MNTN.

“You have a car market. But that doesn’t mean like a Toyota minivan competes with a Porsche,” said Douglas. “They’re going after a different set of consumers.”

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