MNTN CCO Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort Snags Time 100 List Honors
The MNTN Team | 2 Min Read
The following contains snippets of an article featured on Time.
While most people know him as the sardonic superhero Deadpool, Reynolds is also a wildly successful businessperson. Plenty of celebrities attach themselves to products. But Reynolds’ production company and marketing firm Maximum Effort is a viral content machine. He takes hefty stakes in seemingly disparate small companies, promotes them—and has them promote each other—with playful quick-turn ads he calls “fastvertising,” and then sells the businesses for millions. He has invested in Aviation Gin, the discount telecommunications company Mint Mobile, Welsh soccer team Wrexham AFC, and the cybersecurity app 1Password—to name a few. The companies he co-owns or has sold are valued at over $14 billion, according to Forbes.
Reynolds has carried over his Hollywood playbook to the world of advertising: respect the audience’s intelligence and have a little fun. “Consumers know they’re being marketed to, so acknowledge it,” he says. Levy, who has made three movies with Reynolds, believes that Reynolds’ ability to create narratives for his businesses is his friend’s superpower. “He’s really identified a core component to entrepreneurial success,” Levy says. “And it connects back to our day jobs, which is storytelling.”
Maximum Effort, co-founded in 2018 with former Fox head of digital theatrical marketing George Dewey and named for a line in Deadpool, was forged from the bootstrap promotion of the first film. “Maximum Effort” also serves as Reynolds’ life motto. “I can’t say I’ve invested every cell of my body into something that failed,” he admits. “The things that I’ve failed at, I usually didn’t fully believe in.” That same year, Reynolds invested in Aviation Gin. Rather than just lending his face to the brand, Reynolds pitched a cheeky marketing strategy that riffed on his own persona—he filmed a Father’s Day commercial in which he invented a cocktail called “the vasectomy.”
Maximum Effort’s 50-some employees frequently collaborate with MNTN, the advertising platform for which Reynolds serves as chief creative officer. Mark Douglas, MNTN’s CEO, recently had lunch with Reynolds and ambassadors from a brand. “They were describing themselves and what they do, and right at the table he created a commercial in front of them,” Douglas says. “He just imagined how he would tell this story in 30 seconds on television.”
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