MNTN’s Post

Transcript

Welcome back to the Exchange. It's been another big week for AI. During Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced they're bringing Open AI ChatGPT to the iPhone, a move Elon Musk, by the way, called an unacceptable security violation. And another and rather surprising headline from Musk late yesterday is that he's dropping his months long lawsuit against Open AI founder Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Musk was suing them for breach of contract and fiduciary duty. Now, as we continue to cover where AI is a business catalyst versus a killer, my next guest is banking on the former. His firm just launched a platform that uses AI to match products with customers more effectively and promises brands six times the site visits. And you can measure that. The tool was originally geared towards small and mid sized firms, but now it's attracting bigger brands. Let's dive in further with Mountain CEO Mark Douglas. Welcome, thank you. It doesn't hurt to have Ryan Reynolds shilling the product, you know, not not not the worst way to launch it. What exactly is the, the innovation here? Well, so the, the problem we're trying to solve is that Mountain we have essentially brought the SMB. Market in the television small medium yeah small and medium sized businesses and so these big brands have previously dominated TV they just literally broadcast their out the ads out they're spending tons of money but these smaller brands I mean they're passionate about what they're doing we have customers like one wheel umm they they and other customers and they're they're passionate about what they're building all they wanna do is just more people discover it and so they haven't been able to use television now that they can be amount. He is. They don't have massive budgets. So we literally have to pick the consumers I see that are gonna potentially love these products. And that's what Mountain Match does. And we're using two layers of AI technology to do it. So you exist to kind of almost in the middle the ads, the channel like ours might say we need an ad and you say, great, we're happy to serve this one up. The catch is that your clients can't afford for it to necessarily be a national ad running eight times a day, right? Exactly. And even if they have bigger budgets, it's a big country, right? And so that's where. And there's an old adage actually in the advertising too, where people say, I know I'm wasting half my money. I just don't know which half, right? What would match? You don't have to waste half your money, even if you're a big brand advertiser. Let's pick the consumers who are gonna have a lot of affinity for what your message is, what you are offering, because this is not the age of jingles anymore. This is like people just want to discover cool stuff and they want discovered from all size companies. And so that's what we're doing. And, and, and. Leveraging AI, we're not like removing jobs. We're actually, like, enhancing people's ability to do this in terms of the marketers who use it. So where do you get the data that the AI is ostensibly using to figure out, for instance, I'm watching TV and it says, OK, this lady is gonna be interested in buying some diapers or something. So. Yeah. How do you know that about me? How does it, How does it work? Yeah. So there's multiple sources of data. You have what you can call interest level data, which there are companies like Live Ramp, you've probably heard their name. They're publicly traded. Of Oracle Data Cloud, what's really interesting we talked about in our previous show retail media, there are a lot of that data is actually very, very valuable. I think retail media is gonna be more about the data than it is like just the impression sure say the ad impression and there's also event data like maybe a lease on your card is expiring and things like that you combine all that together there are two things we're doing one is we're using generative AI the literally understand your business and then we're showing the company this is. Who was the general AI tech thinks your customer is? These are the right kind of keywords and things that describe your business. It's almost like a personal personality profile. Sure, for your company. If that's accurate and you have confidence in that, then we can use machine learning in order to essentially like kind of say, OK, this is who you are and this is who the consumer is. I know the little known fact I actually was the head of engineering at eHarmony way back in the day. So matching. It comes full side don't know that actually we got invented, you know matching on the Internet and it's not quite the same now, but it's the same concept. This is you're the company here's the consumer. I think you guys are going to be in love and and we make that match and then the the ad is like the swipe on Tinder show you though it's like the means to make them it all comes together so people might see this or maybe see the headline and think you're doing AI ads yeah Brian Reynolds I what's going on No no, no, this says. So the creative itself, is that changing at all? Well, we, we are also doing AI creative tools and we're partnering with a lot of companies on a lot of major AI companies. But that, that's a separate problem. This problem is yet we know, we know someone loves this product. We just have to find them so that you're not having needing these huge ad budgets in order to connect with them. Or if you do have huge ads budgets, they're being spent really, really efficiently. And so that's why we call mountain match would literally matching the consumer. Yes, with the company and the product.