Engineering to Improve Marketing Effectiveness (Part 1)

“Make people so excited about our content that they sign up and watch”

- Kelly Bennett, Netflix Chief Marketing Officer

This statement has become the driving force on our Advertising Technology (AdTech) team. With a slate of great original content to promote, Netflix has a unique opportunity to use both earned and paid media to create the excitement among people all over the world. Netflix is now available in 190 countries and advertises globally in dozens of languages, for hundreds of pieces of content, using millions of promotional assets.

The AdTech team’s charter is to help make it easy for our marketing partners to spend their time and money wisely through experimentation and automation. This involves deep partnership with marketing, operations, finance, science and analytics groups to drive improvements across the board. This is the first in a series of blog posts where we share all the ways we partner with our marketing team all the way from collaborative asset creation and assembly of advertisements to optimizing campaigns on programmatic channels.

Context and Culture:

The Netflix marketing team believes the best ways to create demand for Netflix is to promote high quality, exclusive content that can only be watched on Netflix. If we are successful at creating demand for our original content, new members will sign up. As part of this process, we are more successful if we create and collect on this demand (acquisition marketing) in about the right proportion by market.

Choosing which titles and markets to support remains a mix of art and science, with our creative teams working hand in hand with our technology teams to create winning formulas. Marketing makes top level strategy decisions on the set of markets to advertise in, the set of titles that need attention, and the creative behind the title in partnership with the director/showrunner.

The AdTech team helps our marketing partners execute against that strategy in the following ways:

1. Creating technology to streamline workflows to improve assets for marketing. This frees up the marketing team to be more focused on creative aspects and less on the mundane.
2. Creating a unified internal platform for creating ads and campaigns across all our promotional canvases and channels. E.g. Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, TV, out of home, etc.
3. Enabling technology that allows us to measure and optimize the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns — be it via online programmatic channels or via offline channels. For example, we do this through various algorithms on Facebook and YouTube that help us better understand impact and improve our spend efficiency.

We are proud of Netflix’s data driven culture, as you can read about here and here. Just as we improve our Netflix product through A/B testing, our marketing team embraces experimentation to help guide and improve human judgement. The more we can create tools and processes that streamline our approach, the more our talented teams can focus on helping great stories reach the right audiences. Our philosophy is “every dollar we spend is a dollar we can learn from”. The AdTech team ultimately seeks to create technology that will enable our partners to spend more of their time on strategic and creative decisions, while we use experimentation to guide Netflix’s instincts on the best tactical path forward.

Optimizing for Incrementality

Netflix aims to use paid media to drive incremental effectiveness. Some cohorts of people are likely to sign up for Netflix anyway (e.g. due to a friend’s recommendation) and we would rather not show ads to them to the extent we are able to control for it. Instead, what we are most interested in is having our marketing focus on people who have not yet made up their mind about Netflix. This overall strategy has heavily shaped our philosophy and work as you will find in subsequent blog posts.

At a high level, we can model the marketing lifecycle at Netflix to these four steps:

This article will go in details on first step of Creative Development & Localization. We will give an overview of the work to support our operations team who helps create millions of assets (trailers, artwork, etc.) that are used in Netflix marketing.

Creative Development & Localization at Scale

The rate at which Netflix is growing, marketing all of the Netflix Original titles in dozens of languages, with many concepts & message types will ultimately result in millions of marketing assets. We need our marketing, social & PR teams to come together to scale our content campaigns globally around the world. This will only be possible when we build a streamlined, robust asset creation & delivery pipeline to automate all the processes involved. This is where the Digital Marketing Infrastructure team enters! Our charter is to create applications and services that help Netflix Marketing optimize and automate their processes and scale their operations to deliver a large number of video, digital and print assets for all Netflix marketing campaigns being worked on across the globe.

To put it in simple words — any Netflix trailers and digital artwork that you see on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms or on TV are created and localized using tools built by the team. We even touch some of those physical billboards and posters you see at various freeways and traffic lights and on buses and trains all over the world.