What if building a brand partnership with a major entertainment property could happen in 5 minutes instead of 6 months—and drive 10x better results? What would that change for your marketing strategy?
Today I’m joined by Alan Gould, CEO of Mutual Markets. Alan is at the forefront of a major shift in digital marketing and advertising—using AI to reduce friction between brands and entertainment partners, making high-impact collaborations accessible to brands of all sizes.
Mutual Markets is already working with major streamers and delivering successful partnerships, like PopCorners’ Super Bowl spot with Breaking Bad and Dashlane’s collaboration with NCIS. Alan’s here to talk about how AI is democratizing access to branded entertainment partnerships and what that means for the future of marketing.
About Alan Gould
Alan Gould is a visionary leader and the Founder and Co-CEO of MutualMarkets, the world’s first advanced AI powered partnerships platform that has revolutionized the digital advertising industry. MutualMarkets’ goal is to provide brands with a more organic and efficient way to connect with consumers by setting new industry standards to transform how brands engage with their audiences.
Alan has a long history in data, analytics, and marketing. Prior to co-founding MutualMarkets with his brother Eric Gould, Alan co-founded IAG Research, a media-measurement company created to gauge the effectiveness of ads, and sold it to Nielsen in 2008 for $250M. Alan is also co-founder of a venture capital firm called Peak Opportunity Partners and has been involved in several successful exits from companies like Maker Studios, WorkFusion, Embark Veterinary, Vizu, and early investor roles in iSport.TV, which later saw a $325M minority position from Goldman Sachs valuing the company at $750M.
Under his leadership, MutualMarkets has expanded its global footprint, strengthened its portfolio, and adopted cutting-edge technologies to enhance client outcomes. Alan is passionate about fostering a culture of innovation, transparency, and collaboration, ensuring that the company remains at the forefront of the ever-evolving marketing landscape. In 2021, MutualMarkets announced its $30M raised in seed capital. In 2023, CBS’ Paramount Global partnered with MutualMarkets to grow its advertising efforts. In 2024, MutualMarkets announced its latest innovation – the AI-enabled CMAU – which enhanced collaboration by empowering brands to identify and partner with TV shows and movies seamlessly.
Alan has a Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and a Doctor of Law degree from New York University’s School of Law.
Alan Gould on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alangould/
Resources
Mutual Markets: https://www.mutualmarkets.ai/ https://www.mutualmarkets.ai/
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Boston, August 11-14, 2025. Register now: https://bit.ly/etailboston and use code PARTNER20 for 20% off for retailers and brands
Don’t Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland – the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150“
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:00)
What if building a brand partnership with a major entertainment property could happen in five minutes instead of six months and drive 10 times better results? What would that change for your marketing strategy? Today I’m joined by Alan Gould CEO of MutualMarkets. Alan is at the forefront of a major shift in digital marketing and advertising, using AI to reduce friction between brands and entertainment partners, making high impact collaborations accessible to brands of all sizes.
MutualMarkets is already working with major streamers and delivering successful partnerships like Popcorn or Super Bowl spot with Breaking Bad and Dashlane’s collaboration with NCIS. Alan’s here to talk about how AI is democratizing access to branded entertainment partnerships and what that means for the future of marketing. Alan, welcome to the show. Hey,
Alan Gould (00:47)
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom (00:49)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m looking forward to diving in here before we do though. Why don’t you start with giving us a little background on yourself and your role at mutual markets? Sure.
Alan Gould (00:59)
Well, I’m one of the founders, my brother’s the other founder. We’ve been working together for more than 20 years, been involved in a lot of media companies, got started about 20 years ago, created the first alternative measurement firm, IG Research. We were backed by ⁓ Insight and Bessemer and we sold it to Nielsen. Then I went to work for Greycroft. I was their first venture partner. formed a fund with my brother to invest alongside some of the investments I was seeing at Greycroft. And then a few years back decided to dive back into an operating role and pursue this opportunity.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:41)
let’s dive in here. And, you know, first thing I want to talk about is what I touched on in the intro is just, redefining brand partnerships by using AI. so why don’t we start with setting the stage here? What’s broken in the traditional brand partnership process between marketers and entertainment partners?
Alan Gould (02:00)
Great question, great place to start. Think about it this way, mean, most digital advertising today and a lot of advertising on television, think connected television, is all done programmatically, right? But brand partnerships are still done very analog, meaning, let’s say somebody wants to form an alliance because they’ve got a new feature or a new product line and they’re going after a different target and they want to
They want a partner that reaches that audience immediately for the, you know, for all the obvious reasons. That process typically today starts with a phone call. It starts with an email. It might involve meetings. It definitely involves figuring out who you know in Hollywood that has some connections to some show or some movie or some podcast or some audio book or whatever content you’re talking about, but it’s extremely analog.
So there’s no exhaustive way to look at who might be your best partner. There’s no way to kind of get rid of the lawyers in this process because all of these deals are bespoke, if you can believe it. So they typically take six months to a year, which means only the very biggest brands typically do them because they have the staffs to do them. They have the time to do them. So as a result, you end up with 99 % of the brands in the world marketing alone.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:25)
And so, you know, as I mentioned at the at the top of the show, mutual markets is able to shrink what’s traditionally that that long process, not only that takes a lot of time, but takes a lot of people. You know, as you mentioned, it takes lawyers, it takes people that either know people or, know, all of the above. Right. All the logistics shrinks that down to five minutes. You know, how is that possible? You know, can you walk us through kind of the user experience of the platform?
Alan Gould (03:51)
Absolutely. Well, that’s the power of AI. I mean, we’ve spent a bunch of years refining our own algorithms, figuring out how to use the large language models that are available. And we’ve come up with a way for a brand to search through every television show and movie ever made, for example, and look for cognitive connections. Some might be obvious, some not obvious, but to come up with a selection of partners, which happens instantly.
review those partners in whatever depth you might want to. And then the process is as as typing in, you just type in your brand name into the platform and we quickly generate a creative brief, has the brand voice on it, the voice of the consumer, we generate the personas, all the typical information which in the prior world could take weeks to generate inside an agency.
We generate a lot of shows to take a look at, TV, movies. And then if you want to select a partner, cause you think, God, these would be great pro, you know, you know, lot of these programs, maybe they have five, 10, 15, 20 million viewers on a regular basis. And you want to attach yourself to them in order to kind of grow your awareness. you just select them on the platform.
And in as little as an hour or maybe a day later, the content owners respond to you. And that’s it. Other than the brand providing information about the number of impressions they want to buy, that’s about it. But that whole process that we just described, a brand can do initially, if they know what they’re doing, if they’ve been on the platform once or twice, they can do it in 15 minutes.
And that removes about six months of time. So that makes it possible for smaller and mid-sized brands to take advantage of forming brand partnerships, which is something we’re really proud of.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:00)
Well, and so all of this, I mean, obviously making the logistics of it a lot more streamlined is is incredibly value valuable. All of this is aligned around the idea that consumers want this type of content. Right. So, you know, you’ve said, you know, consumers want brand and content that makes sense, you know, content that reflects both a brand’s values as well as their personal values.
Can you talk a little bit about, know, why, why is that that authenticity and that, ⁓ you know, the making sense part of that. So, so critical in these partnerships.
Alan Gould (06:33)
Well, for the obvious reason, You want to, if you’re going to align with someone, your brand values do have to align somewhat. But in, mean, we’re in a, we’re in such a different world today, Greg, at 2025, if you’re a brand, you’re competing out there against every piece of content ever made. Right. Right. You’re not just competing against the advert ads being run by your competitors. You’re trying to gain the attention of consumers who now have access to literally everything. So you have to start your marketing meetings going kind of, how do we do that? So you have to really change your definition of authenticity to be, is the partner someone that our consumers like? I mean, and that becomes the majority definition as opposed to we have this checklist of values. Does the entertainment property meet
each and every one of them. I give you an example, which is current. Are you watching White Lotus?
Greg Kihlstrom (07:36)
I am, yeah.
Alan Gould (07:37)
Right, well, millions of Americans are watching White Lotus, ⁓ great show. It starts every season. Well, how does every season start? You tell me.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:45)
There’s some kind of it’s it’s kind of after the fact it’s kind of the the murder is is hinted at but not revealed, right?
Alan Gould (07:52)
There’s a dead body somewhere that gets discovered, right? That’s how each show starts. then essentially if you boil it down, what makes the show so much fun is it’s skewering traveling upper income Americans. That’s the, and it’s, that’s what, as, as, as, as the murder mystery gets solved, right? So, but think about who their partners are.
Cause they have like 12 for this season, they have 12 brand partners that are integrated with the show. And you got the four seasons, you’ve got American express, you got BMW and there’s a, there’s a bunch of others. So if they were using strict kind of checklist, they would never in a million years partner with a show that starts off with a dead body and then makes fun of their buying group. Right. But.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:44)
Right.
Alan Gould (08:46)
The definition of authenticity has to be larger today. It has to be kind of a realization by brands that their consumers are real 3D people that have entertainment preferences that don’t mean you shouldn’t acknowledge them. Which is the way that we look at it at mutual markets because the power here is you want to as a brand lever something that your consumers already love.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:02)
Right. Right. Yeah.
Alan Gould (09:15)
That’s the authenticity. now you’re getting introduced by a piece of entertainment that they like from a brand’s perspective. I mean, up to a certain point, it’s not for you to decide what’s acceptable viewing for your consumers, right? They’ll tell you, and then you do the Alliance with them. And I’ll give you a kind of a, kind of a, a bigger example of this. mean, if you think about sports leagues, like the NFL, the NBA major league baseball in the U S and the
Premier League overseas. What all of these leagues have in common is that they have major partnerships. But the NFL has 40 of them and they do it because obviously football generates the highest viewership and it has devoted followers, but it’s not without scandal. mean, we now know that playing the sport can kind of damage your brain and lead to early death. And that doesn’t seem to dissuade Verizon. the death, know, brand managers need to think boldly here. And many, many do, but historically it’s just been the, you know, the bigger brands that have kind of done these major associations. And I think, you know, they kind of like it that way.
Greg Kihlstrom (10:17)
Right.
I can imagine it kind of gives them the turf to themselves, so to speak. But also, you know, I think to go back a little bit, you know, the maybe the term values, you know, I think when certain people hear the term values, there’s a certain set of criteria that is applied to that. But I think, you know, maybe the broader definition of values is I mean, again, if I’m watching White Lotus and I see a BMW, BMW doesn’t necessarily have
All of the same values that I have, but if I like to drive nice cars, I value the brand. You know, so in other words, like value, maybe values in the broadest definition of the term apply, not just is it sustainable? Is it, you know, some of some of those kinds of things? Would you say that’s true?
Alan Gould (11:21)
Oh, no, I think it has to be true. think you as a brand, have to assume that your consumers are complex and contradictory at times. Right. Right. So you can you can enjoy BMW. You can you know, you can enjoy watching White Lotus and you know, you can believe in sustainability. I mean, right. Right. And you see you meet your consumer where he or she is. Right.
Greg Kihlstrom (11:30)
Yeah.
Alan Gould (11:49)
And I think that’s a, I mean, that’s a start. The reason why they’re all doing it, right? So why is American Express doing it? Why is BMW doing it? Because there’s high passion for the show.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
Alan Gould (12:03)
If there’s high passion for the show and there’s an association, it pleases your consumers to know that you’re doing something with them. And consumers are far more likely to start with noticing the white lotus part of the partnership. So that’s where the benefit comes from. It’s the recognition that the entertainment partner is really the first thing that catches the eye of the consumer, not your brand.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:17)
Yeah.
Alan Gould (12:32)
And once you kind of once you get over that, then, you know, on on mutual markets, you know, we now have you now have brands that are doing, you know, partnership ads with multiple pieces of content. In reality, what they’re doing is they’re they’re partnering up for a certain percentage of their digital advertising in addition to the advertising that they do alone, which we call kind of mono. And then the beauty of our system is.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:56)
Hmm, yeah.
Alan Gould (13:00)
It’s an apples to apples comparison, right? Cause if you take your partnership ads, you compare them to the ads that you’ve been running against the same target. There’s no complicate. This is not a complicated thing to measure the difference.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:08)
Right. Yeah.
And so, you know, to go back to the point of the, know, this has generally been the domain of the large. mean, you you mentioned Four Seasons and BMW and, you know, great, great brands, but not every not every brand is is a household name or whatever. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, what does that mean for the for the smaller brands out there to be able to have access to these things, like maybe even give an example of how how a brand’s been able to leverage these partnerships?
Alan Gould (13:45)
Sure, mean, can, because I’ve been authorized to, can talk specifically about two B2B brands. B2B brands make up a large piece of the advertising, especially if you’re talking about the Google ad network or anything on meta. mean, there’s a ton of B2B advertising out there. So we’ve had two companies come through the platform, NWN, which is kind of a,
fast growing high tech firm that a lot of companies use to manage their access to the cloud. then Dashlane is another one, which even though it’s B2B, a lot of people have heard of it because it started out as a password manager, but now it’s kind of more of a cyber full scale cybersecurity. So they did super interesting partnerships.
does 25 % of its business with the emergency responder community, in particular firefighters, like nationwide. So they did a tie up with Fire Country on Paramount, And that drove incredible results. So on their digital advertising, they saw 20 % click-throughs, which is kind of outrageous. And the CMO had to go back two and three times to check the data. This is obviously
Greg Kihlstrom (14:59)
yeah.
Alan Gould (15:05)
You know, it’s so exceeded anything they’d ever seen. And then that worked all the way down. They ended up signing way more new accounts as folks came through the funnel. And the folks at Dashlane did a partnership and they’re redoing this partnership again with NCIS, the show, which is America’s largest television franchise in terms of viewers and time. It’s over 20 million a week on the various platforms.
And the show stands for protection, integrity, security. ⁓ So, and that’s what Dashlane stands for. But everybody knows who NCIS is.
Greg Kihlstrom (15:38)
Yeah.
Right.
Alan Gould (15:45)
Those ads also performed incredibly well for them, which is why they’ve come back and they’re now doing, I’d have to check, but they’re gonna do four or five campaigns with four or five separate shows. they went through their testing phase and they were so happy. But for, I would say for B2B brands that are kind of very active and especially beginning the process of generating awareness, through digital advertising, as well as emerging consumer companies. So if you’re third or fourth in your category and you’re being vastly outspent, how do you get noticed? You think about it. You have to do something different, right? And so this is the something that’s different and new. mean, essentially we’ve created a programmatic structure by which you can create
Greg Kihlstrom (16:25)
Yeah, yeah.
Alan Gould (16:39)
partnership ad.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:40)
Yeah, and those companies, you know, those startups to, know, to the earlier point don’t have the bench of lawyers and people and Hollywood contacts or whoever to be able to make those. But by making it programmatic to your point, it’s it makes it accessible and and it sounds it sounds like it works.
Alan Gould (16:59)
Yeah, it does. mean, we often get asked, well, how do we get rid of these bespoke agreements and the lawyers? And that was simple. The first thing we did was, you know, we gathered up, you know, hundreds of these contracts and we actually used AI to figure out, well, what are the constant terms here that everyone’s using? And we created terms and conditions which reflect the constant terms. Once you accept the terms and conditions, just like on, you know, Etsy or any other marketplace, now you’re in.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:28)
Nice, nice. So use the AI to do that part as well.
Alan Gould (17:32)
We used AI to do that. We use AI to figure out the cognitive connections and we use AI at the back end to help make the ads, right? Because it’s, you have to train an AI model to understand the very specific rules around how you can combine the entities. Because there are still a lot of rules around that. The trick is, you know, if you can make all those pieces work, kind of show me great shows, maybe some I would have thought of, some I didn’t, get rid of the lawyers and can you make these ads quickly? So for the firms that are working with us now, we’re just a part of their daily marketing toolkit. We’re nothing special. That’s our whole mission here is to turn this into something that’s not special.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:17)
Yeah, yeah, no, I know. Well, you know, and you mentioned several uses of AI just then and throughout. What’s you know, as you’re looking out, you know, over the next months and years, you know, where do you see AI taking things like this further? You know, whether it’s brand partnerships or just in general.
Alan Gould (18:37)
Well, in broad, like at a 30,000 foot level, Greg, mean, AI is definitely gonna even the playing field here, right? Because it’s now doable, smaller mid-tier companies are now going to kind of have a foot into the partnership world, right? And that can lead to bigger and that can lead to bigger and better things. One of the things that some clients are doing on our platform is they’ll pick a partner, they’ll run a campaign. And if it works, that gives them the proof to go spend the time, maybe to do something even outside of us. So it’s a, it’s, it’s a great way to test. AI in general will make, will, will, will democratize the ability of smaller midsize. And it does also allows big brands to do this.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:17)
Got it. Yeah.
Alan Gould (19:32)
Like if P &G has been doing this traditionally with three of its brands, now they can do it with the other 57.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:39)
Yeah, yeah, good point.
Alan Gould (19:41)
And so I do think that what will happen here is that kind of making use of partners will simply become part of the planning process. I that’s ultimately how AI will impact this. What was analog will be digital and what was digital will be democratized.
Greg Kihlstrom (19:59)
Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, Alan, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you before we wrap up. Sure. Like to ask this to everybody. What do do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Alan Gould (20:12)
Okay, so I’m not a coder. I maybe I know good code when I see it, but I’m not a coder. I can, my answer to this is non-technical. It’s mostly about how I can continue to help the company grow and make the right judgment call. So I run, I lift, I play a lot of tennis and that’s how I remain agile. mean, agility for me is keeping my brain such that I am making the connections I need to make.
as fast as I can. so that’s the only, that’s the honest answer I can give you. Agility for me is like making my brain work such that my judgment, the judgments that I have are good ones. And then I can participate at the speed necessary to stay up with my brother and his technical team.
