Netflix Ramps Up Ad Suite
Although Netflix introduced its ad tier in late 2022, the company has only been working with in-house ad tech for 11 months now, having rolled out its proprietary ad tech stack, Netflix Ads Suite, in late March 2025. Netflix continues to lean into the personalization capability consumers know and love and use it for advertisers to reach buyers.
At LiveRamp’s annual RampUp event in San Francisco, on March 4, Netflix VP Advertising Nicole Pangis joined LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe for a panel on “Netflix, AI, and the Reinvention of CTV Advertising.”
During the panel Howe said to Pangis, “You have all this massive reach, and yet less than 10 percent of the folks in the room are actually utilizing you right now.”
“The ad load within Netflix is much different than our CTV competitive set and certainly different from linear television players,” Pangis replied. “We’re bringing a different creative experience to the advertising world, because what we shouldn’t do in CTV is lift and shift the linear model between ad load and creative experience and all the things that go with it into this new world.”
Pangis went on to explain, “Different members have different tolerance levels for advertising. Our ad load right now is much lower than anybody in our competitive set.”
NScreenMedia reports that Netflix keeps its ad loads “between 4 and 5 minutes per hour. That means the average ad tier viewer sees 8 to 10, 30-second ads each day on Netflix, or 240–300 ads per month.”
“The way we’re approaching advertising generally is to understand there are members that actually have a different interest level in seeing more ads, and being thoughtful about how and where we deliver an ad,” Pangis went on. “If we know that a particular advertiser will match well, we should deliver the ads. We should not deliver ads just because we can deliver them from an advertiser or because we have [inventory] left to fill."
She reported that Netflix is working with some advertisers to extend the content storyline into the ads. “One example that I really love is we did a great integration with TurboTax and WWE—two things that you probably wouldn’t think to put together,” Pangis said. Who better to pitch saving time on your taxes than wrestlers?
Netflix, Amazon, Yahoo Partnership
March 4 also brought news from Netflix that the company is partnering with Amazon DSP and Yahoo DSP to extend the capabilities of Netflix Ads Suite. Starting in Q2 2026, U.S. advertisers can use Amazon Audiences to reach specific attributes of Netflix subscribers. The Yahoo and Amazon DSPs will make it possible for Netflix to more tightly target consumers for advertisers.
“After launching the Netflix Ads Suite last year, we’re continuing to add new ways for brands to buy and measure ads on Netflix,” Pangis said.
“Advertisers will now be able to tap into new targeting capabilities, better manage how often ads appear across streamers, and reach specific audiences at scale on our ad-supported plan,” states the Netflix press release.
“As much as we'd love to be 100% of their buyers, we’re not.” Pangis conceded. “So how do we ensure that we’re the best partner to be able for them to leverage the consistent definitions that they have to drive?”
Team AI
“AI is a big term right now. It can mean a lot of things.” Pangis told the RampUp audience. “Inherently, what I think should matter to all of us in this room is just being able to do our jobs better, faster, more efficiently, and that can show up in a lot of different ways. As an example, when we’re creating [media] plans right now, we’re leveraging lots of data and AI to make sure that we are putting forth the best plan for a particular advertiser that may be different from what they’ve done in the past, but based on what we know because we have so much data, we can look at a vast amount of data much faster than a human can to actually derive based on the outcome that an advertiser wants to see through AI.”
Another question Howe posted to Pangis was if AI will help Netflix go after small and medium advertisers as Disney and Roku have. “At Netflix, we are not currently focused on SMB,” Pangis replied. “We’re definitely focused on the larger brands and advertisers. Again, we just entered the ads market just a bit over three years ago. So, we have a lot that we can do with sort of the larger brands and agencies that we work with.”
Pangis went on to say that the expanded capabilities of Netflix Ads Suite “could mean bringing our IP closer to advertisers, which we’re doing more. That could be a huge amount of incredible data that we sit on at Netflix, that we are starting to work on through [LiveRamp] and others to do data-appropriate, privacy-compliant data collaboration.”
Netflix hopes their special sauce will make CTV look different. This balance of data and technology, making things faster, more efficient, and more personalized within the ad environment should bring a unique experience to the marketplace. Time will tell if consumers agree.
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