Netflix has said that its ad-supported tier has attracted five million monthly active users and that engagement on its ad plan is “similar” to its comparable ad-free plan.
Speaking at the company’s first upfront presentation, Jeremi Gorman, president of worldwide advertising said that “we are building a forever business” and that had “worked hard to be brilliant at the basics” and focused on areas “advertisers told us matter most — like geo, age and gender targeting; third-party verification and deploying the right brand suitability mechanisms.”
The streaming service also announced a range of new ad features to better measure campaign performance and place brands in highly visible real estate areas.
A new sponsorship feature will let advertisers sponsor the presentation of the most popular series on Netflix at launch. This feature, as with most of the others announced at the upfront, will come to the US first with other countries set to follow.
Netflix said that the sponsorship feature will let brands “align themselves with meaningful collections… by featuring their campaigns within local holidays” such as Valentine’s Day and “key brand moments” such as Netflix’s Sustainability Stories collection.
A new Top 10 placement will guarantee brands being featured within Netflix’s most popular shows and films as part of its daily country Top 10 series and the Top 10 film collections.
An integration with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR) is coming in Q4 to US brands. This offers deduplicated audience measurement metrics for campaigns running on the Netflix ad-supported plan letting them measure the unique reach of campaigns and “deepen their understanding of Netflix’s audience, including by age and gender.”
Another partnership with EDO, Inc, a firm that measures campaigns across linear and streaming found that Netflix outperforms the streaming and linear averages when it comes to driving engagement. Viewers were apparently more than four times as likely to engage with an ad on Netflix compared to other streamers and more than four-and-a-half times as likely compared to linear TV.
Gorman also said that Nielsen measured Netflix’s reach “at two or more hours is higher than almost everyone else’s reach at a one-minute threshold. Two hours compared to one minute. That’s what sets Netflix apart from other streamers. It’s the difference between foundational viewing and simply sampling.
“That’s why we prefer to talk about metrics that actually matter to advertisers – like monthly active users. Just six months after launch, our ad-supported plan has nearly five million global monthly active users, with a median age of 34,” added Gorman.
