Netflix’s in-house advertising technology will begin rolling out in the US in April, Netflix’s vice-president, EMEA advertising, Damien Bernet revealed at The Future of TV Advertising Global conference in London on Wednesday.
The adtech stack launched in its first market, Canada, in November. It allows advertisers to control their ad buys directly within the Netflix platform rather than through a third-party service.
Netflix had previously signalled that the adtech would roll out in the US some time in the second quarter ahead of a global release later in 2025. Bernet did not specify a release date for other markets.
He said Netflix is applying a “test-iterate-learn” approach to its development of the adtech and that the company is “learning with Canada” currently before a wider roll-out.
“We need our own adtech platform to be able to innovate and be flexible enough to create new solutions for our advertisers,” Bernet said, adding that the company is “building this for the very long term”.
The same test-and-learn strategy is being taken with other efforts as Netflix expands its remit into live sports.
Bernet admitted that Netflix faced “tech challenges” when live-streaming last month’s Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson boxing match, which broke records for Netflix.
The fight was watched by 60m households globally, with a peak viewership of 65m concurrent streams. The high demand appeared to weigh on Netflix’s servers, with over 85,000 users reporting outages.
Netflix’s ad tier hits 70m users as it rolls out in-house adtech in Canada
European Trade Desk and DV360 launch in February
Apart from launching its own adtech, Netflix recognises that advertisers want flexibility to be able to buy ads programmatically via third-party demand-side platforms, Bernet explained.
Netflix originally allowed for such ads to be bought exclusively through a partnership with Microsoft’s Xandr, before expanding to The Trade Desk, Magnite and Google’s Display & Video 360 (DV360) for US marketers in August.
Bernet revealed that the Trade Desk and DV360 programmatic partnerships are expanding to European markets in February.
“I’m actually super happy from my position in Europe to be learning from the US and to have more time to be prepared,” he told the audience. “We are using this time to educate our partners.”
Bernet added that he had visited The Trade Desk’s London office earlier in the week to help train staff on Netflix’s system.
He added: “We pioneered the streaming world. We want to pioneer the way we advertise on streaming.”
Netflix CEO: ‘Work still ahead of us’ to improve ad offering
