Digital Social Hour - Mark Douglas On Building a Billion Dollar Company & Partnering With Ryan Reynolds | DSH #156

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

On today's episode on the Digital Social Hour, Mark Douglas talks about partnering with Ryan Reynolds, Building a billion dollar brand with MNTN and how he is using artificial intelligence. BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you've seen that just got a ton of eyeballs? The one that got the most is Peloton. Basically, HBO show had a main character die on a bike. Mr. Big in the show is riding a peloton and he dies on the peloton as the character in the show. That's how they wrote him out of the show. So the stock actually crashed. The next day the stock of peloton actually went down. So over the next, so within 36 hours we developed, so the Maxim Ever everything created an app the peloton that um the ad was that he faked his death and ran off with the peloton that's awesome brilliant that's brilliant Welcome back to the Digital Soul Shower. I'm your host, Sean Kelly. Here with my co-host, Charlie Cavalier, and our guest today, Mark Douglas. How you doing? Good, man. You? Good.

I'm doing great. You look like you're in a great mood, man. I'm a little tired, actually. I started the day early. And I've been to Tucson and back this morning, today. Wow. That's a drive. Yeah. I flew. OK. Yeah.

I have a pilot's license. Really? It's only one. And you've already made a round trip? Yeah. So I flew myself this morning and flew back. Man. So you have like your own jet or something?

Yeah. Okay. We're going to have to dive into that. I went to a high school called Aviation High School. And so even as a kid, I wanted to be involved in aviation. I didn't wind up pursuing it as a career. But, yeah, I eventually got a pilot's license. So I got an airframe mechanics license in high school.

Only high school in the world you can do that. And then as an adult, I learned to fly. And eventually, yeah, I'm a type-rated jet pilot. That's really cool. And it's not something I actually talk about. This is the first time I'm actually. Really? Very few people know that.

Yeah, because it's kind of like, I think people respect that i'm in the front of the plane i agree flying it as opposed to the back of the plane just burning jet fuel you know like saying that's funny i didn't know there was a high school for airplane yeah that's yeah new york city has i grew up in the i grew up in new york city so they had these vocational bronx science aviation and it was fun i feel like that's one of the most useful skills you could have in life being able to fly i find it i mean the thing is connecting a little to business i do so many more in-person meetings than i would right because i wouldn't have gone to tucson this morning for a meeting if you know what i thought was an important meeting unless you know without the convenience

of being able to get there and get back you know here right yeah what was the hardest part about getting your license um i did it like a job i had just sold the company earlier in my career, and I went to the airport five days a week for 90 days. At the end of 90 days, I was a licensed pilot. Now, they then reach jet levels. That takes more training. But I really dove into it. I had the luxury of being able to kind of dedicate myself to it at the start. Yeah.

I want to dive into Mountain and how you even got business partnered with Ryan Reynolds. Sure. Can you tell that story? Yeah. So I'll give you a quick background on Mountain. So Mountain essentially has democratized TV advertising used to be this thing where you had to spend big budgets and really expensive creative and hire big agencies in order to get your brand to television, which is a really powerful medium. What we did is we turned that into like a software solution where you can just come into the Mountain Software platform. You can literally upload TV commercials and set who you

want to reach and it runs like any digital campaign like like if you're using Meta's ad platform Google's ad platform but we did that for television and it exploded I mean we now the small you can go down as low as $5,000 a month on your ad campaign I mean no one before we did that thought you could do tv advertising for that little yeah yeah and or it can go millions and we have customers in that entire spectrum and so we just basically with the advent of streaming television which makes it like not broadcast and cable makes it more personal that enabled us to build all the software to kind of democratize the medium, the TV network.

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ryan reynolds became our chief creative officer um about two years ago and the way that came about is one of the problems we had is that we have all these customers coming to TV for the first time, but they literally didn't have TV ads. So that was their biggest issue is like, this sounds great, but I don't have a 30 second commercial for ABC, you know, for a major TV network. So how am I going to get that? So Ryan has an agency called Maximum Afford that he built to market Deadpool because the original Deadpool, the studio didn't really provide. I love that story. Yeah, it didn't really provide much of it. Oh, they didn't provide marketing? They wouldn't pick it up.

He had to do his own. Yeah, they wouldn't give him the marketing. So they bought the rights for Deadpool. Yeah. And then they wouldn't build it. And then for like five years, it was sat on a shelf until somebody pretended to leak that it was going to happen or something like that. And then everybody went so nuts. The studio is like, I guess we got to make it. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah. And so and obviously it's been a massive success. But part of that success was the marketing of the film. And we've all been exposed to the marketing. A lot of that was earned media, meaning it was just like viral video, basic videos that Ryan and his team, very small team, which is how he loves it, were doing to basically market the film.

So the typical method, I'm not much into like marketing movies, but the typical method is trailer, trailer, trailer. And billboards. Yeah, I mean, he kind of showed how you really use social media to market a film, essentially. And so now he has an agency, and they started to take on other clients. The thing, when I met Ryan, that was interesting because I kind of, a lot of people ask,

I ask them, so why do you like doing commercials? Because he actually enjoys it. He says, this connects to your story. He says, it took like eight years to make Deadpool for 50 million people to see it, 100, however many people see it. He said, I could do an ad this weekend, and 50 million people see it that week.

And so he's like, I'm just a creator. And he thinks that advertising is another medium, and obviously social media, to create. And so that's why he you know, he took maximum effort and was like, let's keep doing this and let's do it with emerging brands, which that closes the story, which dovetail

exactly with mountain because we were enabling the TV medium for advertising with emerging brands. And then Ryan's maximum effort team love emerging brands. And someone introduced us. and I mean within three days everything we were like okay let's combine that's a match

made in heaven yeah let's just make it let's just do this together and and it's been you know fantastic yeah that's literally the hardest working I wouldn't even say and you know the old saying hardest working person in show visit hardest working person business Wow like he Hardest working person in business. Wow. Like, he has an insane work ethic. He just had a major exit, right? Yeah.

And people give me credit for it. I'm like, hey, congrats, Mark. Yeah, I didn't sell any gin. That was Ryan. Or, you know, it was a mobile company. Yeah, Mint Mobile. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, I didn't know Ryan.

He did that deal. That helps mountain, though. No, it does. It does. And we work with that company and now T-Mobile. And so that was all good. Now, with the decline in TV viewership, are you going to pivot towards putting ads on Hulu, and other so when I'm saying TV I mean all like streaming oh okay so you're already on there right so we're already yeah on we we stream ads with

through partnerships literally with every ad supported content source in America but what we call living room quality so like episodic programming you know like like as sit down watch tv type program got it and and the reason for that is because that's where it performs the best so a typical youtube ad actually doesn't really perform so one thing to keep in mind all of our cut the the ad industry is kind of divided into two sectors you have one sector brand advertisers they buy ads the other sector what we call performance advertisers to records but they they they don't buy ads they want to buy traffic right right and so like no one

goes to Google no one wakes up in the morning goes I want to buy some ads on Google search page what they really want is I want to get traffic to my brand. Right, right. And the ad is just a means to an end. Mountain is in that part of the market that's direct response, which is three times the size of brand advertising. So everyone thinks brand advertising. In the U.S., that's a $70 billion market. Direct response to advertising, Google, Meta advertising google meta mountain amazon that's

180 billion dollars wow yeah so it's much much larger and so the enable the medium for for you know kind of emerging advertising any size advertising these are e-commerce companies travel brands direct to consumer brands that are looking that you know kind of just just make you aware of what they have and if it's something you like great they've just got a new customer wow we got to talk because i know so many big ecom brands that spend so much money on facebook ads yeah i'll send them your work awesome gotcha what has been the biggest thing that you see other people doing and don't give away too many trade secrets now right what do you see people doing incorrectly when they try to copy what you're doing um well usually it kind of starts with the brand themselves so they get very focused on the medium like okay i have this

team to do like search this medium to do meta this medium this team i mean to do tv rather than focus on the method which is like because the the skill set that your meta team has is actually probably way better for television advertising in this new world of you can target it you can measure it things like that that we've enabled. And so that's the biggest struggle. When we go to larger brands, they want to silo everything. And we're like, your TV team has never been held accountable to metrics at all. They're just literally broadcasting out ads.

They're the ones buying ads as opposed to driving traffic to the brand so that's the biggest issue is you should say what is your goal and whoever in your company is best at that goal is who you should assign to it so to get back to your question i don't think our competitors clearly understand that either yeah yeah so what have been the most successful ad campaigns you've seen that just got a ton of eyeballs? There are a lot. I mean, the one that got the most is Peloton. Yeah, I used to get that every day. Yeah, we were involved in that. Nice.

And they got called out on an HBO show. Basically, HBO show had a main character die on the bike and so i didn't hear about that i ride a peloton every day what's going on there was nothing wrong with the peloton but the stock crashed right like the basically what is you know when when um what's the phrase when life follows art or something like that. Oh, right, right, right, yeah. Right, so- Wait, he died? Yeah, so they had Mr. Big. Oh, in the show. Mr. Big in the show is riding a Peloton, and he dies on a Peloton as the character in the show.

Oh my gosh. That's how they wrote him down in the show. So the stock actually crashed. The next day, the stock of Peloton actually went, yeah. So over the next- Wow. So within 36 hours we developed and so the the maximum everything created and after Peloton that

The ad was that he faked his death and ran off with the peloton 30 literally the ad was created and released on our platform and you know Every social platform so fast that people were like no you had to have no no it was created over a weekend put out on mountain's platform put out on social media got six billion views in six days billion views yeah that's yeah i woke up monday morning to every literally everyone from good morning america to al jazeera wanting to do an interview about the peloton about the kind of the response ad wow to what to what happened and that's a thing that um we call fast advertising yeah which is like your first thought is probably

a bet like don't try this another learning is like most companies try to have that one big ad campaign. You're better off just kind of staying in the flow of culture and just doing a lot of small campaigns at a lot lower cost. Right. And those opportunities, you know, just come about every week. You just kind of have to if they kind of dovetail with your brand in a nice way sees them so that's the other thing is you know you'd like companies routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars obviously for the Super Bowl I was about to bring it yeah time to mad nobody does that on tick-tock no or Instagram they spend 10k yeah and then they do you know

new ones every month one of the funniest quotes I saw by the Super Bowl commercials was mr. beast after the commercial said if anybody wants to reach a hundred million people for less than seven million dollars give me a shout okay I'd heard seven to ten that's crazy so at what point does a brand even justify spending seven ten million dollars on a Super Bowl commercial versus like what could be a year-long social campaign you I mean it obviously it has to be something like a product launch you you're trying to create a ego maybe I mean you can see me stuttering trying to answer the question.

And the creative doesn't have to cost that much either. They spend a lot on that, too, for the Super Bowl odds. It's an insane amount of money. And just, again, first thought, do it fast. Make it culturally relevant. If that fits the moment, the brand. And that tends to work much better and at a much, much lower cost. I saw you guys are using some AI stuff too, right?

Yeah. So we just launched or announced, we haven't actually launched it yet, a creative AI platform. So what we're trying to do is it dovetails what we're just talking about. Instead of having brands do one or two commercials a year, we want to help lower the cost of building the creative so they can do one or two every month. And so that's what we're after there. And so initially, we actually are a lot of people think AI kind of is trying to eliminate jobs. I think the best quote I've seen on that you guys have probably heard is that AI eliminates the job of the people who are not using it. Yes. Right?

I like that. Yeah. Yeah. And so we're trying to enable the creators to be able to build more, but do it at a lower cost. We're not trying to replace i don't know any marketers waking up and go you know today i want to be a videographer no no they're and no amount of ai tools are really gonna like bring all of the skills of the videographer in terms of the creativity and things like that so what we want to do it's more is if we can help lower things

like the cost of storyboarding. The nightmare scenario in advertising for creative is you hire someone, you agree on what you want, they build it, and you hate it. And now they still want to get paid, and you have an asset that you're like, I would never share this with anyone. And so you can do things like make live storyboards. We can use generative AI so you can kind of get a really good feel for what the ad's going to be,

even if you're still going to do full production on it. Things like that. So we're attacking those kind of elements in the ad creation process through it's called Viva from Nice. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Do you ever see we'll use ryan as an example yeah is he ever gonna like you know sign his rights over to use his face as an ai deep fake in a movie well i think the writers guild is striking

my default response would be probably no oh i, I thought it was about pay. They're striking about AI, too. I think it's in there also, yeah. But I don't know. I mean, that's – I often get asked this question, you know, what's it like to be Ryan Robbins' boss? I'm not Ryan's boss. I mean, Ryan is a prolific creator. He's, you know. He's incredible.

Him and George Dewey, his co-creator and the rest of the team that are there, we all work together, but they pursue a lot of projects. That could occur in the future. It's definitely not something that I think anyone's thinking anytime soon yeah what are some emerging trends you see in the advertising space coming up because i noticed on tiktok the ads are more like homey it's not like professional you know what i mean right it's more like intimate well that's the that's the whole idea is it is to look you lower the cost by being more real, like like by,

you know, kind of like being honest that, hey, I just want to show you my product. Right. That's so I don't know, 50 years ago or probably even less. It was, you know, jingles. And let me subconsciously get you to buy a product. You have to be determined to buy a bad product these days. It is so easy to check. I don't check i don't

buy i don't buy lunch without checking reviews seriously right nothing do i buy without checking reviews it takes no amount of time so you can't like kind of sell someone these days and for a while for a while now you just can offer you say, hey, this might be interesting. And then to get people to pay attention, you have to be creative. And that's where you're referring to that kind of homey feel, that genuine feel. And the more people feel that, generally the more they lean into it. If they feel it more as like a form of entertainment then they they're going to appreciate it more and that's how i shop now to be honest yeah

and i look at reviews every time on amazon yeah i mean it's it's crazy if you're like buying a product and going i wish i didn't buy this i mean you didn't do you literally did not do your homework. D-Y-O-R. In your opinion, what is the least useful social media platform in existence? Well, I'm neither a big Twitter fan or threads. I mean, it's like blue check mark ocean right now yeah like i i went on the threads this morning um because i was curious and there was not a post from someone who didn't have a blue check it's too easy to get now and well it wasn't even so much that is that the engagement is coming from professional content creators it's not there's no there seems to be literally almost zero organic um stuff happening on on um threads i mean granted it's

like not even it's a day five yeah but the um you know twitter i is is just i'm still, for me personally, Instagram is a great platform. TikTok is fun to use. So you like the visuals. You like Instagram, TikTok. Yeah. And I think it's connecting to what we do. It's great. All of our customers use those platforms.

Yeah. You never hear of people making Twitter ads. Yeah. But we'll see. making Twitter ads. Yeah. Yeah. And the, but we'll see. I mean, competition breeds creativity. So that the whole like kind of Twitter space kind of, I'll put threads in the general concept of Twitter space, you know, one to many communication to anyone. Yeah.

Competition might really change that arena. And I think, you know, words have kind of disappeared from social media. Seven seconds or less now. Yeah, I think they do play a role. And it's part of the reason you see a lot of perfect, even if it feels really organic, it's still professional content, is because the words are so much easier than than videos and things like that for most people. Yeah. Yeah. I don't use Twitter anymore, dude. No, I think,

you know, we both hopped on the threads thing recently. Twitter became a bit of a cesspool. I'm not going to lie. You get on there. The UI is not fun. You know, there's ads everywhere. Buy this, shill that, tag you in this, retweet this like that giveaway here giveaway over there so I mean I'm not a huge tick-tock fan we both love Instagram so it's nice to we like the visuals like you do yeah it feels like it's not for it's for extroverts yes like for people that want a lot of attention yeah whereas everyone forgets social media started with it truly was between friends right like original Facebook your feed only had content I'm old enough where you had to be invited by

somebody who was already on Facebook to join Facebook and you had to have a dot edu email address Wow into Facebook that's crazy yeah oh seven yeah where do you see the future of content because it seems like it's leaning towards short form now but I don't know if that's a fad or do you think the long form will make a come I mean they but they both play a role I mean the at the end of the day a lot of money is spent on people sitting in front of TV and watching Netflix and watching you know kind of long form content so that's not I mean there's a role to play there. At the same time, like me personally, I use YouTube a lot.

And I'm listening to shows like this and watching shows like this. And so I think they both play a role. And the thing is, is now it's so mobile also that you're just kind of always consuming content. The one thing that is if you look at the stats, so the average user person uses social media who's active on social media, 59 minutes a day. They watch the same person watches TV three hours a day. Wow. So those are actual actual stats. It's part of why my company pursued the space because we were like

well the TV market is under monetized because it's only selling the one or two thousand companies that the the where all the revenue is generated there is social has you know hundreds of thousand millions of companies leveraging it as a media as a advertising medium so the the the medium is still there and anytime you see it in like and um certain shows on netflix i mean they routinely kind of cross over into becoming part of like the popular culture conversation yeah squid game yeah and and so you know that's kind of proof that long form they both they both play a role it's also kind of proof that long form, they both play a role.

It's also kind of proof that people are just insatiable consumers of content, period. Yeah. I'm not sure one's taking from the other. I think the TV is not growing as fast, but it's huge to begin with in terms of number of hours spent. That's where you build a cult following, Right. When you have the long form view. How much focus, if any, have you put into advertising in video games? We haven't done anything there.

Really? And I find it to be an enth- I would love that. Off camera sometime, I would love to have that conversation. We should, yeah. Because we're very, very focused on the kind of democratized TV opportunities. So we're kind of staying very tightly focused there.

But a lot of the technology we've created, if not most all of it, could be applied to gaming and other. You told me about the Fortnite music thing, right? Do the Fortnite music thing. And you know what? So I love reading. I'm a marketing geek. I love industry data reports more than I want to admit, honestly. Yeah. There's a lot of people doing the dual monitor or the triple monitor setup, right? Where they're sitting

there and they're playing fortnight, but they have YouTube off to the side or Netflix off to the side. So the socials people and the Netflix people think they have that guy's attention, but really he's playing fortnight and he's ever advertising in the video game is the one winning the most yeah that's funny that's really interesting and so i don't doubt it at all yeah and it's really interesting to see like you know fortnite call of duty valor and all these you know games i mean game is going to be a 200 billion dollar industry by 20 yeah it's the biggest uh it's yeah i mean i think people always surprise at how small the movie industry oh yeah and and because it has such a kind of impact in everyone's mind but in raw numbers like the video game industry is

but but i believe it's bigger than television oh yeah the harry potter game they just released the one harry potter game they just released made more money than all eight movies combined oh yeah you serious in the first like three weeks those movies are legendary dude like for real yep and so there's a lot going on video games now and that also kind of makes me because a lot of the advertising you're doing is it's not immersive but it's on social media and it's like you're breaking the fourth wall right right it's ryan breaking the fourth wall or whoever you're using breaking the fourth wall when are we going to start seeing if there is a fifth wall, if you'll allow me to just make that up, when are we going to start seeing people interacting in the ads on social media instead of

just consuming it? Um, I don't see a lot of that right now. And the, the reason being is part of it is that substantially raises the cost of creating. Like most companies don't have them. I think you could start to see some of the biggest brand advertisers. I think those are the opportunities they're looking for. That emerging e-commerce brand that we kind of have been referring to, I don't think they have the you know, like they have the resources of people or, you know, to do that. But I think really large brands.

And then once you have people who break that ground, then you can start to like kind of bring that, again, democratize it, bring down the costs, things like that. It's interesting, you mentioned's interesting you mentioned having someone's got a monitor in front of them, and they got Netflix and YouTube. Because I mentioned a few minutes right before we started,

I mentioned that my company is fully remote. So we have 500 people with no office. 300 of them are playing Fortnite right now. Could be. People find that really fascinating that we we're and a lot of companies who thought they were going to be remote are kind of like giving up on the concept and the but we're we're actually very committed to it and almost couldn't go back if we wanted to because everyone is scared wow Wow. Like we have people when the when the pandemic started, I think something like 98% of our team lived in L.A.

and now it's down that they know it's scattered. It's like 50 less than 15% every day, which is a combination of all the hiring we've done. Yeah. Combined also with everyone scattering. And but it's we do do I just thought this topic be interesting we do do quarterly off sites and the off sites cost as much as offices wow to fly 500 people oh yeah one location cost a lot of money sounds like a lot of yeah it's not we don't save any money on it. It's kind of a, I was going to say lifestyle choice, but there's a better word.

I'm not sure what it is, but we'll just say it's a choice. It's not less expensive, or if anything, it's a bit more expensive. To make it doable, you have you have to have like you have to have really clear metrics for everything because i don't you know if that person's taking a break and playing fortnite more power to you as long as they get their work in the numbers like so you just care about the metrics you don't care how many hours they're putting in well yeah i mean you never in a tech company it never works to manage people by managing their time. I always say, like, when you when you join a company, you're essentially entering a relationship.

Except most companies, it's a very transactional. It's like a relation you would never get into in your personal life. You would never enter a relation and go, OK, this is how it's going to work. I'm going to give you money, you know, return you're going to you know do everything i want exactly when i want it you're going to it used to be wear what i want like like almost wear well you still do that yeah wear uniform in a lot of jobs um the the and the you know all these things you would be like you would never enter a relationship like that. I'm good. And so to have a team of that size where there has to, like any relationship,

there has to be a lot of trust and there has to be a lot of clarity. Absolutely. And a lot of vision and passion. We all know where we're trying to get together. And then if everyone views as we're in this relationship together, then each individual with their coworkers and so forth, to get together and then if everyone views as ever we're in this relationship together then you know each individual with their co-workers and so forth you can you can make it work and i think we've made it work really well and as a result you know like i um everyone can live where they want they can we have a lot of digital nomads that kind of travel and live all over and i i personally i think the we've grown tremendously during that time so i think it's really really worked for us

mark it's been a pleasure man been a great episode where can people find out more about you thanks appreciate it can they find you on instagram oh yeah instagram teach me how to douglas teach me how to number two teach me how to douglas teach me how to Douglas. Teach me how to Douglas. Number two. Teach me how to Douglas. Teach me how to Douglas. Yeah, that's the main platform I'm on, teach me how to Douglas. All right.

Teach me how to Douglas, guys. Go find them. Thanks for watching. Thanks. I'll see you next time.