Netflix, launching its advertising-supported platform with a simple suit of targeting options, plans to add finer capabilities.
The global streaming player will open for business next month able to deliver ads by country, genre and the top 10 shows.
Doug Anmuth, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase: “Early feedback from marketers and agencies has been that the targeting options at launch are fairly limited.”
Greg Peters, COO and chief product officer, told a briefing: “Part of what we want to do is actually get this out to market quickly.
“We went from basically the point we announced it to delivering it in about six months, which has been a testament to a lot of hard work on internal teams and to Microsoft (ad sales partner).
“We do have relatively basic targeting capabilities in terms of contextual targeting … but that's sort of consistent with what we see with television.
“Now our job is to move from that into more of what we expect from a digital world where we have 100% signed-in audience, fully addressable, fully targetable, and so we can start to layer in additional targeting capabilities over time.
“I think it's also worth noting when we talk about that that we're very cognizant of privacy, and we want to make that paramount and how we would think about this offering and all of the data that we use will just be used to basically deliver more relevant ads offering on Netflix, and we're not using that data in any way, shape, or form for a profile building off Netflix or anything like that.”
Peters didn’t respond to specific questions over pricing, the level of CPM (cost per thousand).
“I'm not going to comment on any specific pricing,” he told the analyst briefing.
“But I would just say that I think we've got a very attractive offering, and that's a combination of the audience that we have, that we're delivering to, that oftentimes it's hard to access in other ways, certainly harder to access in traditional TV in many cases.
And it's a result of the incredible content that we've got. So, Ted's (chief content officer Ted Sarandos) team is doing an amazing job at producing titles that advertisers want to be next to. That's what you see is driving the demand and the pricing that we can get.”
Anmuth at JPMorgan Chase: “When you're going out to agencies and marketers, do you feel like you're going after linear TV dollars? Or are you going after digital dollars right now?”
Peters says the platform now is mostly competitive with linear television.
“Obviously, I think that we'll build into that over time. And a lot of what makes digital attractive will be part of our offering as we go.
"When you think about sort of demand capture and those direct response ads versus sort of the more brand side, we're probably going to be leading for some time more into that brand side of things where we can be more competitive.
“But I think those worlds are going to blur over time realistically. And our job is to be highly competitive with the technical components that we can add in, in terms of targeting, but also then be very competitive because we have really incredible content and an incredible audience that advertisers want to connect with."
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