Netflix named Amy Reinhard as president of advertising a month after the company’s chief financial officer declared Netflix’s nascent ad business was still in the “crawling” phase of its rollout.
Reinhard replaces Jeremi Gorman, who joined Netflix in August 2022 after tours with Snap and Amazon Advertising.
Since 2020, Reinhard has been VP of studio operations at Netflix. She joined the company in 2016 as VP of content acquisitions.
Netflix, famously commercial-free for most of its rise as the dominant player in streaming, launched a $6.99-a-month ad-supported tier last November, with Microsoft providing much of the technical support.
Netflix said that in the second quarter, its ad product had more than 10 million global monthly active users, but that didn’t seem to provide the scale Netflix needed to meet advertiser demand or Wall Street expectations.
During an investor conference in September, Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said: “We’re still in the crawl of the crawl, walk, run stage. So it is not easy to build and add business from scratch. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Neumann added, “what we’ve done so far is not material to the overall revenue of the business.”
The revelation helped send Netflix stock down 5% that day.
In announcing Reinhard’s appointment, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peterssaid: “In her nearly seven years at Netflix, Amy has proven to be an exceptionally strong leader — with a deep understanding of the entertainment business and consumer tastes as well as the ability to build lasting partnerships across the industry. These skills, in particular her strength in TV and film, are critical for the success of our ads business.”
Reinhard, who has a bachelor’s degree and MBA from Harvard University, served as president of worldwide TV licensing and distribution for Paramount Pictures.
“I’m excited for this new opportunity and to join the exceptional team during this phase of growth,” Reinhard said. “Together we will scale our advertising business and connect our incredible shows and movies with audiences and brands around the world.”
Regarding Gorman, Peters said: “I want to thank Jeremi for building our ads business from scratch. In just one year, she’s built the foundations we need to succeed — attracting world-class brands to Netflix and an incredible team.”
And Gorman said: “My passion is scaling businesses from the early stages, which I have done many times — none more exciting than at Netflix. We’ve built a world-class team and laid the foundations needed to create a forever ads business. The stories at Netflix are second to none, and brands are eager to be a part of that zeitgeist. Working alongside Amy on the leadership team for the past year, I’ve seen her operational excellence and entertainment expertise firsthand, which will help enable brands to benefit from ‘The Netflix Effect’ in new and remarkable ways. As I move on to build again, I will be proudly watching the growth of the business, and eagerly awaiting the next season of Outer Banks!”
Netflix also announced that it officially launched measurement in the U.S. for its ad business with Nielsen’s Nielsen One Ads system.
Nielsen will be integrating Nextflix’s first-party data along with its own panel-based measurement to create metrics for deduplicated cross-platform viewing metrics.
Nielsen will be able to capture 15- and 30-second pre-roll and mid-roll monetizable ads across CTV, desktop and mobile platforms enabling the measurement of all ad impressions on a digital platform, giving advertisers on Netflix a broader view of performance metrics to fuel cross-platform campaigns.
Previously Nielsen has said it would use DoubleVerify and Integrated Ad Science for ad verification and EDO to measure campaign outcomes.