AdRoll vs. MNTN

Ready to find partners and solutions that’ll help your multichannel marketing, full funnel efforts reach the next level? You may have stumbled upon AdRoll and MNTN, both offering powerful retargeting features, audience targeting, and attribution.

How do the two compare when it comes to other capabilities, pros, cons, and use cases? We’ve got the answers right here.

What Is AdRoll?

AdRoll is an AI-powered advertising platform that helps businesses run, measure, and optimize multi-channel, full funnel campaigns. We help advertisers run on channels across the marketing funnel, including display, social, and CTV.

AdRoll’s features include:

• An AI-native ad platform that recovers abandoned carts, builds customer loyalty, boosts brand awareness, and more — in whatever format you like, whether that’s image, video, dynamic product, native, or rich-media and across channels including CTV, display, video, and native.

• Automation builder to manage all your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest efforts all in one place.

• Audience segmentation to maximize your first-party data and ensure every marketing message is hyper-personalized to shoppers’ needs and wants. Our CTV targeting capabilities allow you to segment audiences with the same advanced features as our other channels.

• Self-serve and managed service options to give advertisers the flexibility of choice between independently guiding ad strategy or working with a dedicated account manager who provides weekly campaign performance meetings, proactive campaign recommendations, custom reporting, and more.

We also offer a detailed reporting dashboard that lets you see precisely how your campaigns are performing, and we have dashboards for each of your channels. Not a numbers person? You’re in luck — we analyze your data to provide high-level insights and recommendations on where to allocate your budget for the largest impact possible.

Which ad channels does AdRoll offer?

Since AdRoll is a multi-channel platform, you get the benefit of variety. Advertisers can use CTV, display, dynamic, HTML5, native, and video ads to create a diverse ad strategy.

Having all these in one place prevents workflow and budgetary strain as well as the outcomes and reporting difficulties that come with juggling several disconnected platforms. 

What targeting capabilities does AdRoll have?

Since AdRoll is a multi-channel platform, it supports targeting from a variety of sources.

AdRoll customers can target using zero- and first-party data sources in addition to third-party ones. This opens opportunities for a variety of data for campaigns across the full funnel. These are the segments you can target:

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, etc.

• Behavioral data: Past purchase history, website visits, app usage, etc.

• Interest-based targeting: Hobbies, interests, and passions.

• Geographic targeting: Location-based targeting down to specific ZIP codes.

• Psychographic targeting: Values, lifestyles, and attitudes.

• Contextual targeting: Targeting based on the content a viewer watched.

• Account-based targeting: Targeting based on contact lists.

AdRoll’s zero- and first-party data sources include website visitors, mobile visitors, ecommerce store visitors, CRM cookie-matching, and demographic, interest-based, and in-market third-party signals.

How does AdRoll’s bidding system work?

AdRoll developed BidIQ, a machine learning engine that considers billions of data points. BidIQ factors in hundreds of features specific to the advertiser, the page on which the ad will be displayed, and the person seeing the ad. 

All of this happens at an incredible scale with extremely low latency; BidIQ is able to determine an exact value for every CTV and web ad opportunity across the internet in real-time.

Working with AdRoll gives a CTV advertiser access to an AI-native platform with years of experience in precise targeting and bidding.

What’s more, AdRoll users can allocate budget to the highest performing channel, with a great degree of control over their budget.

What Is MNTN?

MNTN helps brands create, launch, and monitor performance ads streamed over smart TVs and over-the-top (OTT) devices. In other words, once you select your target audience, your ads will be shown during ad-supported shows on networks such as the Food Network, ESPN, or CNN. For an extra cost, you can also extend your campaign and use MNTN to reach the same audience through display ads when they’re browsing on their computers and mobile devices.

Additionally, MNTN also offers the following:

• Creative services, so you don’t have to hire a production agency. (Keep in mind that while the MNTN website states they offer different packages for every budget, it is unclear how its Creative-As-A-Subscription services are priced.)

• Campaign measurement and attribution across the entire customer conversion journey — on both the MNTN platform and Google Analytics

• Audience retargeting — simply place the MNTN pixel on your website, and site visitors are automatically added to your retargeting audience pool. 

In other words, MNTN handles TV ads less like a traditional marketing channel and more like a digital performance channel alongside paid search, social media, or display. 

Which ad channels does MNTN offer?

MNTN laser focuses on one channel: CTV. It positions itself as a “Connected TV performance marketing platform,” and that’s what you get.

MNTN does offer display advertising to supplement CTV strategy. This advertising option is static image only.

What targeting capabilities does MNTN have?

A targeting strategy with MNTN can also include zero-, first-, and third-party data, but options are more limited.

MNTN offers targeting for website visitors and CRM cookie-matching. Their third-party targeting includes demographic, interest-based, and in-market signals.

Because MNTN is only cross-channel between display and CTV, it may not offer as many options to use data from your various advertising platforms for opportunities like retargeting.

How does MNTN’s bidding system work?

MNTN’s bidding system is simpler: it reallocates budget to higher-performing placements.

When setting up a MNTN display campaign, users create a 1:1 link between individual TV ads and individual display ads. Display ads only deserve devices in the household.

Because no sophisticated ML is used in their keyword targeting, MNTN is not able to automatically optimize an ad in real-time with as many customizations as AdRoll. MNTN optimizes on historical performance, shifting budget reactively, as opposed to AdRoll’s ML, which helps determine the value of the impression before its served, optimizing for price and performance before serving an ad.

AdRoll vs. MNTN: The Showdown

While both AdRoll and MNTN help brands reach their target audience and launch campaigns from a single plug-and-play platform, they differ in significant ways:

• Although MNTN makes TV ads more accessible to brands than ever, TV is just one channel out of many in any robust multichannel strategy. Comparatively, our platform covers ads across HTML5, video, display, and more, streamlining your MarTech stack and helping you save massively on digital advertising subscription costs. 

• MNTN may offer retargeting for TV ads, but AdRoll is the undisputed industry leader in cross-channel retargeting. Not only does our retargeting platform cover millions of websites and mobile apps (including Facebook and Google) but it’s also powered by expert machine learning to ensure you get the results you need. 

• AdRoll’s managed and self-serve options give greater flexibility to customers. MNTN is self-serve only, meaning you can’t opt for support from a dedicated account manager who will help you optimize campaigns. 

Here’s the one-to-one comparison of AdRoll vs. MNTN:

	AdRoll	MNTN
Ad types	CTV, display, video, dynamic, HTML5, native	CTV, image disply
Audience	Focus on midmarket advertisers who work across several channels, CTV included	Focus on SMBs new to CTV
Optimization	Real-time proactive ML	Reactive optimization to focus on high-performing placement
Analytics	Reporting dashboards with real-time updates	Black box, they report on their own reach against a keyword and ROAS
Targeting options	Website visitors, mobile visitors, ecommerce store visitors, CRM cookie-matching, third-party audiences based on demographics, interest-based, and intent-based signals.	Website visitors, CRM cookie-matching, and third-party audiences based on demographics, interest-based, and intent-based signals.
Ad funnel strategies	Cross-channel retargeting and brand awareness	Brand awareness and retargeting to display

The Final Say

TV ads aren’t a luxury anymore — they’re becoming a staple in many multi-channel ad strategies. CTV advertisers are looking for options that integrate well into their full funnel campaigns.. 

MNTN display prospecting ads focus on households that have been previously targeted with a MNTN Connected TV ad, and customers cannot control how much budget is allocated to display. AdRoll has no such limitations. Our brand awareness display ads (which include video ads) reach across the open web to target high-intent users wherever they might be.

MNTN doesn’t offer a free trial or subscription plan, making it risky for brands wondering if it’s the right fit, particularly since the platform is self-serve only. On the other hand, AdRoll can offer more tailored solutions with guided support.

It’s clear: Unless you’re an established brand with significant resources for experimenting with new channels and ad types, you’ll receive a more robust campaign strategy and targeting options with AdRoll compared to MNTN.

Curious about what else AdRoll can do for your bottom line?

Last updated on April 3rd, 2025.