MNTN’s Matt Collins: Zero-Click AI Searches are Forcing Performance Marketers to Rethink Everything

The questions that we're asking as performance marketers is what does what does our marketing mix, our performance marketing mix look like in a world in which a lot of AI overviews are picking off the searches that we are that we do. And what the data suggests from a study that was done in April of this past year is that 83% of searches that are directed to AI overviews result in zero clicks.

And in so that environment, uh unlike the one that's prevailed for 25 years where pay-per-click marketers are counting on a search resulting in a click that takes a user to a website or some other part of the conversion engine that a brand will operate. What happens when AI captures that next step and and doesn't send them anywhere else?

So, Matt, I believe that for a long time has brought advertisers in to video that maybe haven't had a video strategy in the past or even really done much video to speak of. How do you, how do you bring them into the fold and and how is does that lack of a legacy help or or hinder the strategies behind these advertisers?

It just changes the conversation that one of the first things that we often times have to convey is a bit of an education. about why advertise on connected TV in the first place. And so that begins with discussions around the scale of the audience. Uh and and but then it of also will will shift into the nature of how it works. And connected TV advertising runs on the same digital plumbing and wiring that the rest of the digital advertising ecosystem operates on.

And so where that matters, or where that really comes to fruition and meaning for a marketer is that unlike traditional television. So we'll think broadcast or cable where an advertiser may have to roll up to the cashier's desk with a six figure check to buy in just to be able to buy enough inventory that will be delivered and with enough payload to be able to get a meaningful signal. In the world of connected TV advertising, for roughly, I say the cost of testing out an all-new paid social ad product, you can test connected uh television advertising and get a meaningful signal back without risking the P&L.

And so the the progression typically is explaining the scale uh of connected TV, the precision with which it can be constructed for the purposes of audience construction, and then the precision with which it can be measured uh to all the way down to the order ID, if you're a direct to consumer e-commerce brand or you sell it brick and mortar.

And to paint all that picture together and then to be able to say, and it can be, it can be unlocked at relatively low cost.

So, Matt, I want to talk about measurement a bit, but but before that or maybe in in concert with that, the idea of a video, television, CTV as primarily been thought of as a branding medium. But obviously as a performance focused uh platform, how do you incorporate brand or do you incorporate brand and brand lift, other metrics like that into the performance structure?

Well, it's an interesting uh dynamic uh that we we encounter customers who tend to spend however they define it, they tend to spend lavishly on paid search and social to create demand, harvest demand. And they want they're curious about television because they see it as uh a way of being able to expand their media mix beyond the duopoly.

And so they typically knock on our door and they want to know the sorts of things that direct response marketers want to talk about, which is how do I construct an audience? How do I measure the impact? Uh especially for a screen that's unclickable and that might be something that both you and I are watching at the same time. So it's not one to one. And then they have questions about creative because they recognize that the creative considerations that might govern how I show up on a mobile screen, change when it's on a 65 inch screen.

And so they want to know like, how do I show up and make a great first impression, but then also achieve the things that I need to achieve to get my bonus. And so these are all the considerations they typically have at the start. And so we encourage them to test, we answer those questions. we encourage them to test the channel. And then as they begin to find what works, scale up, uh and develop the confidence, the funny thing is that a lot of those marketers then come to us and say, you know, I have a question.

How do I measure the brand lift of this thing? Which, you know, 20 years ago, not even, like 10 years ago, that might have been the first question that marketers ask, how do I measure the brand lift of this thing? They're coming to it as a secondary question and or they may want to know, how do I measure the impact of of CTV on my store traffic to a brick and mortar location. So the brand conversation absolutely does come in and marketers, I think increasingly, when they get to a certain degree of confidence in the medium, new to TV advertisers, they begin to see that the investments they make

in a full funnel approach will benefit the performance outcomes they hope to achieve in one month, three months, six months down the line.

So, how do you deal with the issue of trust which seems to be also at at kind of the pivot point when it comes to the role of AI as both a, a kind of decision maker alongside the consumer and as as part of that, as we first talked about, that zero click economy.

Well, I'll start with the trust that comes with television. And this is a to me this is a fun one. It comes down to for me three things that uh that really uh are proof of the trust that it has. And so when I think about connected TV, as a consumer, I think about shows, I think about the pit, I think about drive to survive, and I think about actors, talent, production companies, directors with names I know.

And so what that signals to me is that there is a human being behind the content whose reputation is knowable and that conveys a sense of trust. The second thing to know is that we this just this past summer celebrated the 85th anniversary of the first television ad. It was a an ad for Bulova time pieces and it ran during a New York Giants baseball game.

And so we've had 85 years of welcoming advertising into our home, recognizing for many of us that it subsidizes the cost of production, makes it possible for us to be able to access this at a cost that may not otherwise be attainable. And to accept the ad now oftentimes as a source of its own entertainment, something that can evoke a feeling in the audience watching it.

And the third thing that I would say is there is only one screen that you and I have that literally will hang on the wall next to pictures of our families. So all of this conveys a sense of trust in the in the screen that's otherwise not necessarily available to us on other devices. I think that the the level of trust that consumers have in more AI saturated environments. Right now the data suggests that as consumers we're cautious.

that we recognize AI's ability to distort and mislead and even if we're consuming something that's entertaining but delivered in a way that where AI's imprint is obvious, those sorts of things can bleed out if they're not done well into other content that might be more about informing us.