After revealing its plan to move into advertising just over a year ago, Netflix in July enlisted Microsoft as a tech and sales partner to help it launch an ads tier quickly. But under worldwide advertising president Jeremi Gorman and VP Peter Naylor — poached in August from Snap — it also began building its own team, and Netflix salespeople increasingly are taking over conversations with advertisers.
"They're doing a great job building awareness, reaching out, relationship-building," said Kelly Metz, managing director of Advanced TV Activation at Omnicom Media Group."They've hired the right salespeople to go after the right people to have the right conversations. The challenge is, they need more scale."
Netflix has also brought on several directors and other roles in ad sales who've worked at Hulu, Snap, and elsewhere. They are, who is Publicis' main point of contact, and who spent eight years at Hulu, rising to director of advertising sales. Most recently, she was SVP of national sales at Vevo.