Speaking to that innovation, one of your new ad innovations, a modular framework, uses AI to put brands within the worlds of shows like Wednesday or Stranger Things, surrounding a brand or product with show imagery. How did that come together?
One of the biggest requests we get from our advertisers is the ability to get closer to our content. And we obviously do integrated marketing campaigns … but they are very intensive in terms of the time and the energy that they take. So, as we think about trying to scale our ability to do that, we do have all these fantastic video and photo assets from the libraries of our worlds, so being able to connect those with advertisers and bring our users more into that world and maintain that look and feel is going to be important to advancing our interests and our advertisers interests.
You also mentioned onstage that Netflix will be able to test, iterate, and innovate on dozens of formats by 2026.
Those dozens of ad formats are meant to be an industry-specific approach, meaning an auto ad may look different from a CPG ad. The effectiveness may be different, so these are things that we’re looking to test. But the idea being the modularity, it’s very easy to assemble these on the fly and also optimize and personalize. We think this could be a competitive advantage for us, but it’s early days, and we’re excited to get started with a couple of partners and test into it.
You got Emily Cooper (Lily Collins) to pitch advertisers in a video about Netflix’s ad suite and innovations, which was perfect since her character is in marketing and advertising. What was the genesis of that?
All the credit to our marketing teams. This is why they are so fantastic at what they do. Because I agree with you. When I first saw it, it made me laugh, and I thought it was so perfect in terms of what we were trying to say. It was a great integration moment. I believe that she was on set because they’re starting to film the next season. We did, at first, try to get her to do live, but I believe that it’s because she was in production that she couldn’t do it. But such a perfect moment.
