CANNES — In recent years, many advertisers hit a fork in the road, and chose their path.
Much spend has gravitated toward either outcomes-driven performance channels or creative-driven, top-of-funnel brand building.
Lauren Benedict wants to connect the two.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, the SVP, enterprise sales at ad-tech firm MNTN, explains why.
Connecting creative
Benedict says: “Our vision really is to turn connected TV into the third scalable performance channel – very similar to … what Google has done to search and what Meta has done to social – … in a way that gives advertisers the opportunity to plan and measure their campaigns with speed and flexibility and precision.
“When you think about creative, it’s a little bit disparate from the media equation right now.
“(We are) thinking about how we can bring those two opportunities closer together, because creative is such a driver of what performance means to a brand.”
MNTN climbs
First founded in 2009 in Culver City, California, MNTN (pronounced “mountain”) provides advertising software for direct marketers, agencies and brands.
Specifically, it offers:
- Audience prospecting for connected TV campaigns.
- Retargeting to connected TV.
- Attribution for CTV campaigns.
- Use of third-party audience categories.
- Ad creative management.
- Measurement for CTV ads.
The company has been leaning into the creative side. In 2021, MNTN acquired Maximum Effort Marketing, the creative advertising shop of Ryan Reynolds and George Dewey, leading to Reynolds becoming MNTN’s chief creative officer.
‘Fast-vertizing’
For Benedict, who was previously a sales executive at Hulu and The Walt Disney Company, that is part of rebooting creative.
“We have talent like George Dewey and Ryan Reynolds collaborating and thinking about brands, and doing it in a much shorter cycle in a obviously less expensive fashion, and moving at what we call the ‘speed of culture’,” Benedict says.
“Ryan likes to talk a lot about ‘fast-vertizing‘ – essentially, taking that element of creative, shrinking the process so that brands can be nimble and flexible and, quite honestly, relevant in the marketplace when their message needs to be sort of heard.
“So it really does allow brands to be more opportunistic with the stories that they’re telling and how they’re connecting with customers.”
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