Stranger Ads? Netflix Ads Leader Explains How AI Puts Brands in the Worlds of Its Shows

When Emily Cooper is the one pitching advertisers, things are clearly going trés magnifique.

Netflix’s third upfront week event, held last week at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York, included announcements that its ad tier had grown to 94 million monthly active users globally, the introduction of new AI-powered formats the put brands in the worlds of shows like Wednesday and Stranger Things, and a cameo by Lily Collins’ character from Emily in Paris pitching advertisers on the company’s in-house adtech.

In addition to the ad updates, the streaming giant previewed its upcoming slate, including revealing its newly announced Christmas Day NFL game matchups and teasing new seasons of Wednesday, Stranger Things, The Diplomat, Forever, The Four Seasons, and more, along with new projects such as Jamie Foxx’s Fight for ’84 and Denzel Washington and Daisy Edgar-Jones in Here Comes the Flood.

Following ADWEEK’s conversations with NBCUniversal, Fox, Amazon, TelevisaUnivision, Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix’s ads president, Amy Reinhard, spoke to us about the company’s updated adtech, its evolving approach to its NFL Christmas games, and how exactly the company got Emily Cooper for its event.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Netflix Reveals New Adtech, Recruits Emily in Paris to Pitch Advertisers at Upfront

ADWEEK: What were the priorities heading into this upfront event?

Reinhard: We wanted to get two messages across. One, which is what we’ve been working on over the course of the last year, is the fact that we launched the ad suite, and are excited about the international rollouts of that coming up here in the next six weeks. So that was the first priority. The second priority was to marry that with our fantastic content slate and bring out the stars.

In terms of what I’m excited about, I would just say launching our ad suite takes us to a whole new level, because the operational complexity is reduced for us. I talked a lot about being able to test and learn and iterate quickly, and so the pace of innovation—that’s going to be quickened in the future.

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.

One of the most memorable moments came when NFL commissioner Roger Goodell appeared onstage with a Santa suit, the Netflix coat from your Christmas games, to announce the next Netflix NFL matchups. Plus, Jerry Jones made an appearance, too.

We were very excited about the games that we got, and by the way, within Netflix, most people were hearing the game pairings at that moment. So there are a lot of happy folks here because it’s a great matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and the Washington Commanders, and then the Minnesota Vikings against the Detroit Lions. That was a great moment for Jerry to be there as well.

Year One was a success for the NFL Christmas games. What can we expect for Year Two? Will there be more opportunities for brands to get involved? Or how are you approaching that?

Yes, I think we have the luxury of a little bit more time now this year. We know what to expect. We know what the matchup is going to be, and we have the experience we had last year, obviously, with “Beyoncé Bowl” as well. You can expect something very similar. We are looking to have it be a monumental moment on Christmas. We know families are gathered around the TV, a perfect time to engage with both advertisers and our members. So I think you can imagine that it’s going to be similar to last year, and even better.

You announced 94 million monthly active users for the ads tier. But can you explain the numbers because that’s just accounts, correct? With the actual number of users, you said it was more like 170 million.

We have always anchored our count of monthly active users around profiles, because, to be honest, we want to make sure that we’re anchoring in data that we know, and so we have the data around our profiles that are logging in. The point that we also wanted to make is that people are hearing very large numbers the rest of the week. Those numbers are apples to oranges, because sometimes they’re including a person per household multiplier, or they’re including duplication across different platforms. So we just wanted to make sure that people understood a more apples-to-apples comparison based on research that we have of how many people are in the households that we are addressing, to make those numbers more analogous.

You can’t talk about upfront this year without mentioning tariffs. What’s the messaging you’re having with buyers?

We’ve been very optimistic about what we’re hearing from the market. I think everybody is taking a bit of a wait and see approach to understand how the rest of the year is going to net out, but we haven’t seen any pullback in marketing spend, and we are talking about a number of different opportunities in the back half of the year, whether it’s around integrated marketing opportunities or sponsorships around our the slate and the titles that we have coming back.

Because we’re smaller than other folks in terms of the size of the overall business—and we’re still looking to grow—we’re still optimistic, even in this macro environment, that we can accomplish what we need to do.

CMO Marian Lee introduced several Wednesday partnerships onstage, including Booking.com and a mysterious orange fingerprint for Cheetos, with details on the way later. What can you say about the evolving relationship with brands?

This has been a pitch for us from the start. We want to make sure that we’re very selective about the opportunities that we do because the most important thing for us is that they need to feel authentic.

I wish she could have talked more about the partnership with Cheetos because I think that’s going to be very innovative. But we’ve done a lot of work in the past, like with Expedia and Domino’s. I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to keep rolling these out. And just to be clear, these are co-branded partnerships. These aren’t integrations. We think these will definitely be creative that will help them stand out in the marketplace.

Lastly, will you be back in upfront week next year?

It’s so funny because you are not the first person to put this out there today. We just had a conversation about this this morning. I’m always fascinated by the ideas that our marketing teams come up with. So I think the big thing for us is to make sure that we’re innovative, and there are different ways for us to stand out. And I can tell you some of the ideas I heard about this morning would definitely accomplish that.

For now, we just want to bask in the moment a little bit of having pulled off a successful, streamlined event, which I’m so proud of all the team, because there are a lot of people who work on these things and work very hard. We’re going to take a moment before we get into the planning for next year, but I can promise you it’s going to be memorable.