Netflix sees 150% boost in upfront ad sales

Streaming giant Netflix saw more than a 150% increase in upfront ad sales commitments over 2023. 

The commitments include investments from all key categories such as CPG, tech and entertainment, auto, QSR and retail, said Netflix is a statement seen by MARKETING-INTERACTIVE. 

In tandem, the streaming giant closed partnerships for a number of its upcoming films and series including Squid Game, Wednesday, Outer Banks, Happy Gilmore 2, Ginny & Georgia, and Love is Blind. Netflix also closed deals around live events including WWE Raw and the Christmas Day NFL games. 

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"Our advertising clients remain excited about our highly engaged audience and the variety and quality of our programming. For Season 3 of Bridgerton, we secured multiple international on-screen title sponsors including Pure Leaf, Amazon Audible, Puig, Booking.com, Stella Artois, and Hilton," said Netflix. 

"Just last week we partnered with LVMH, COTY Gucci, Kaiku Caffee Latte, Aeromexico, Google, and Rakuten for the highly anticipated return of Emily in Paris," it added. 

This comes after the streaming giant announced in May that it is giving advertisers new ways to buy, new insights to leverage and new ways to measure impact. 

Some of its efforts in expanded buying capabilities include the ability for marketers to set up private 1:1 marketplace deals directly with Netflix, the introduction of Google's Campaign Manager 360 and Innovid for impression verification and an extension to its existing Double Verify and Integral Ad Science relationship for fraud and viewability verification into programmatic channels.

In addition, the company is working to expand buying capabilities to include programmatic guarantee in November. The programmatic private marketplace buys are currently available in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Mexico and will be extended more globally in the following months, said Netflix. 

Meanwhile, for new measurement partnerships, Netflix will extend its campaign performance measurement suite into NielsenOne, Lucid (or Cint), EDO Inc., NCSolutions, Kantar, and Affinity Solutions for all buy types.

The streaming platform has also partnered with clean room suppliers Snowflake, InfoSum, and LiveRamp to create a secure and privacy-safe environment for its members and advertisers.

It added that it will also be launching its in-house ad tech platform which will be tested in Canada in November and launched globally in 2025.  

Its in-house ad tech platform was first announced in May this year. 

The platform aims to give advertisers insights to leverage and new ways to buy while also measuring impact.

This follows Netflix’s continued growth and momentum of its ad-supported plan which currently has 40 million global monthly active users as compared to five million a year ago. In fact, over 40% of all signups in the ads countries now come from the ads plan, according to a statement by Netflix. 

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