It is a truth universally acknowledged that an executive at a streaming service must be in want of a podcast appearance.
Nicolle Pangis, the vice president of advertising for the United States and Canada at Netflix, the streaming colossus that resisted advertising for years before embracing it in 2022, recently sat for an interview on "Brave Commerce," a podcast hosted by Rachel Tipograph and Sarah Hofstetter.
Ms. Pangis spoke of the topics that have become familiar refrains among those building advertising businesses inside platforms that were not originally designed to carry them: the need for what she called "stronger data collaboration," measurement systems that can speak to one another across platforms, and the application of artificial intelligence to the infrastructure that connects advertisers to audiences.
(One imagines a day when an advertising executive will be asked about the future and will not mention artificial intelligence, but that day has not yet arrived.)
The conversation touched on the evolution of measurement in connected television, a category that has grown faster than the industry's ability to agree on how to count it. Ms. Pangis also discussed the role of so-called clean rooms — the data environments where advertisers and media companies can compare information without either party seeing the other's raw files — and the integrations that allow brands to connect their own customer data to Netflix's viewing audiences.
Perhaps most notably, Ms. Pangis spoke of Netflix's ambition to turn what she described as "audience engagement and fandom" into outcomes that advertisers can measure with the same confidence they once placed in a Nielsen rating.
Whether the fans of "Squid Game" can be converted into purchasers of household goods as reliably as the viewers of "Seinfeld" once were remains, as they say, to be measured.
Original story published in Adweek: "Netflix's Nicolle Pangis on Measurement, AI, and the Future of Streaming Advertising"