By Michael Bürgi • July 22, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
This Media Buying Briefing covers the latest in agency news and media buying for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Monday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
A quick look at the state of video viewing in the U.S. shows that streaming continues to be the place that’s attracting more viewers week after week. In June, for example, streamers attracted more than 40% of the viewing audience.
And yet, as the $20 billion-plus upfront marketplace continues to get negotiated, streamers continue to face a brick wall of resistance from media buyers and chief investment officers over their pricing requests. At the same time, ad-sales stalwart Peter Naylor, the well-regarded vp of global ad sales at Netflix — arguably the most powerful of all streaming services — will be departing the company, in a move that surprised many but not all of the media agency community.
What’s going on here?
A few factors are at play:
- Amazon’s entry into the ad-supported market with the full breadth of its Prime Video audience flooded the market with inventory;
- Netflix and other streamers are said by buyers to have overestimated the pricing they could get, given that they’ve added live sports into their content mixes;
- The incorporation of more automated buying into the upfront process means relationship-building executives like Naylor aren’t as important to the process as they once were.
In many ways, Netflix is having a solid year. Netflix Ads plan membership grew 34% quarter on quarter, according to a Netflix representative, and accounts for over 45% of all signups in markets where it’s ad-supported. The rep added that Netflix is on track to achieve critical scale for advertisers next year.
Still, something’s changed that led to last Thursday’s news that Naylor was leaving the popular streaming service, and it sent a shudder through the video seller and buyer community. Netflix declined to make Naylor available for comment, but noted he will be replaced by a new head of sales for U.S. and Canada, instead of the global role Naylor held. And Naylor didn’t respond to a request to comment via other social channels.
It comes at a bad time for Netflix and its competitors, all of which are said to be struggling to meet ad revenue goals amid reduced CPMs that buyers are demanding. To be sure, streamers as a group are still getting a bigger share of total ad dollars being laid down in the upfront — they just might not be hitting the marks set out by their CEOs and CFOs.
“The growth of the actual dollar spend going [to streaming] is still healthy,” said one major media buyer. “Maybe it might not have been up to some expectations, and that’s probably coupled with the fact that we do see a lot more clients holding general upfront dollars back, or are not yet ready to commit because of uncertainty with their business. Or just the fact that it was a little bit of a softer scatter marketplace like last year.”
In some ways, one could indirectly blame Amazon for Naylor’s exit, since the e-commerce giant’s entrance into ad-supported streaming by converting all its Prime subscribers to see ads (they have to opt out if they want ad-free content) flooded the market with a ton of supply.
“Amazon coming in at the scale that Amazon has was deflationary [for the streaming marketplace]. It comes in and forces all the CPMs down,” explained another head of investment at a major media agency, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as did all buyers reached for this story. “So Netflix, which already has a highly constrained subscriber base for ads and was disproportionately high from a CPM perspective — and literally has no way to prove that their stuff actually works — is in a rough spot right now. You could see how the corporation would take that out on the ad sales head.”
“Streaming has an influx of impressions to sell, so therefore it will be down,” said a third head of investment at a different holding company.
The second head of investment said they weren’t surprised at the news of Naylor’s departure, but credited him for a valiant effort to build out Netflix’s ad solutions. “He did a very good job convincing them to invest in things that he knew were going to be valuable,” they said.
But that same buyer added they believe Netflix is missing its very aggressive ad revenue target because of the hard line buyers are taking in upfront negotiations. “They went out to the marketplace with inflated CPMs and probably inflated forecasts on their end that were impossible to meet,” said the buyer.
One change in the market that, on paper, should have helped streamers is the addition of live sports inventory. Netflix is selling two Christmas Day NFL games and has WWE content (although the latter teeters between entertainment and sports), while Amazon has NFL and will have an NBA package in a year.
Buyers said the streamers again got too aggressive with pricing for that inventory. “When [Netflix] went to market with the Christmas NFL games, they were way over market in terms of [price] — they just didn’t do the right sports marketplace intelligent research before they went to market on the pricing model,” said the second buyer.
“They came out way too high and aggressive, and they over-projected audience estimates for something like Christmas Day — it was too much,” said the first buyer. “But we’ve seen that in the past when a property gets rights to something. We saw it with Amazon and Thursday Night Football — they get the rights to something, and they immediately want to, obviously, try to price it high.”
Still, sports inventory will help Netflix and other streamers in the future, once they find the right pricing levels. “As Mike Tyson prepares to take a swing at Jake Paul (Iron Mike’s ulcer notwithstanding) and with Netflix hosting NFL’s two Christmas Day marquee games in 4Q24, these advertiser-friendly live events (and the WWE deal from 2025) will continue to grow their ad business exponentially,” media analyst Brian Wieser wrote in one of his Madison and Wall columns last week.
Finally, programmatic investment in the video marketplace is rendering the relationship side of the buy-sell process less intrinsic than it was for the last six or seven decades.
“I don’t think that’s going away. I think there’s a lot of advantage of the efficiencies of buying through those pipes versus the fully manual IO process,” said one programmatic vendor, who also declined to speak for attribution.
Naylor, a sales executive with a solid pedigree of experience across the media spectrum — in reverse chronological order, at Snap, Hulu, NBCUniversal and iVillage and Lycos — joined Netflix in August 2022 along with Jeremi Gorman from Snap, and the duo was heralded as a strong choice to oversee Netflix’s nascent ad sales effort. Gorman left within a year of joining.
Where Naylor ends up is anyone’s guess at this point. But his boss, Netflix’s president of ad sales Amy Reinhard, said in a statement about him: “Peter’s enthusiasm, industry knowledge and relationships have been invaluable in getting our advertising business off the ground. I want to thank him for all he has done to build our team, grow the business and position Netflix for success.”
Color by numbers
LG Ad Solutions notes a shift in more political ads and candidate messages shifting to CTV in a record election year of political ad spending in the U.S. The preference across parties: 57% of Republicans, 63% of Democrats and 70% of Independents said they prefer watching streaming TV compared to cable, satellite and broadcast in a study of more than 900 U.S. adults in Q1 2024. — Antoinette Siu
Some stats:
- Not surprisingly, linear TV viewership is dwindling. In the last 12 months, viewers across political parties began watching less linear TV — with Democrats watching 27% less, Republicans watching 35% less and Independents watching 39% less.
- Meanwhile, free, ad-supported streaming is gaining traction: CTV users prefer FAST channels, with 69% of Democratic, 72% of Republican and 66% of Independent viewers saying they prefer it compared to ad-free subscription streaming.
- 68% of Democrats, 56% of Independents and 61% of Republicans are cycling through streaming apps, or added an app and then canceled or paused it after watching specific content.
- People get distracted: 93% of viewers across parties said they multitask across devices while streaming.
Takeoff & landing
- Publicis and Omnicom both released first-half 2024 financial results, showing strong organic revenue growth of 5.6% and 5.2% in Q2, respectively.
- Separately, Publicis Media won Nestlé’s media duties in China, adding to creative and commerce work it’s already been handling in the region.
- IPG’s Initiative won Truth Initiative‘s media business, moving from Stagwell’s Gale, which did not defend the business.
- GroupM hired Sandy Welsch to its Global Commerce executive team as executive director of global commerce partnerships and enablement. He moves over from Omnicom’s Flywheel, where he was vp of omnichannel platforms.
- S4 Capital‘s agency network Media.Monks last week simplified its brand to just Monks.
Direct quote
“Google has taken the ‘oxygen out of the room’ for over four years with their Privacy Sandbox. That’s been terrible for privacy as better and more diverse solutions have been starved of investment.”
— James Rosewell, founder of the Movement for an Open Web (MOW) — a coalition of anonymous businesses and industry players. Check out Seb Joseph’s latest story on the topic.
Speed reading
- Ronan Shields and I dug into the changing of the guard at GroupM last week, with ad-tech exec Brian Lesser taking over for Christian Juhl as global CEO.
- Antoinette Siu covered independent agency group Mod Op‘s continued expansion into AI and creative services.
- Krystal Scanlon found out that, despite Meta’s move to start running ads on its social platform Threads, advertisers aren’t hugely interested in trying it out.
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