Now brands can subscribe to get their own Ryan Reynolds creative magic (sort of)

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Ryan Reynolds may just be the ultimate ad man. Well, the ultimate Ryan Reynolds ad man at the very least. We’ve seen him spin his viral magic for Aviation Gin, Mint Mobile, Netflix, Samsung, and more—sometimes even all in the same commercial. Now any brand can subscribe to get their own version of the Reynolds creative magic. Sort of.

The Culver City, CA-based ad tech software firm MNTN (pronounced “mountain”) acquired Reynolds’ marketing creative studio Maximum Effort in June and installed the Hollywood star as its chief creative officer. Today the company is announcing a new creative as a subscription—or CaaS—service for marketers to bundle their creative together with their media investment in a bid to make the process more efficient and effective.

“Currently media and creative is almost always handled by different companies,” says MNTN CEO Mark Douglas, in an email. “Separate teams, separate budgets and little collaboration. Instead of having separate teams focused on different goals, creatives on the commercial and media buyers on ad placement, we’re bringing creative and media together with the singular focus: delivering results for our clients.”

Reynolds says the marketing landscape has changed significantly, making effective creative work more critical. “With so much noise, brands looking for breakthroughs need to embrace creativity and experimentation more than ever,” says Reynolds, in an email to Fast Company. “This is about making that as easy as possible.”

MNTN is officially announcing the new service in a full-page ad in The New York Times that reads like a letter from Reynolds: “Somewhere along the way, the process of making and distributing ads has become over-burdened. With layers. With cost. With overthink and expectations … We want to make advertising simple, funner, and faster.”

Reynolds also stars in a new MNTN ad extolling the virtues of CaaS.

The creative process here, according to Reynolds, will feel familiar to brands, just faster. “They share with us information about their products, their goals, and we’ll come up with creative ideas and produce them,” says Reynolds. “What’s different is our creative teams will now be constantly learning from the more than 10,000 campaigns running MNTN. We’ve demonstrated our ability to tap into culture, to produce incredibly quickly and now we’re on the cutting edge in the business in terms of what works on television.”

Of course the pitch of consolidating marketing services will sound familiar to anyone who’s ever worked with or even heard of an advertising holding company, but none of those has a merc with a mouth.

Reynolds says that for the last 20 years or so, the advertising discussion has revolved primarily around digital and data, leaving TV creatives feeling a bit antiquated. “MNTN has built a software platform that embraces digital and data for TV, but we needed a new way to think about, and build, creative,” he says. “That’s what CaaS is. A simpler, faster and hopefully funner way to get great creative without all the layers and overthink.”

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