Netflix’s In-House Ad Platform Is Doubling Advertiser Spend

One year after launching NAS, measurement unlocks have rebuilt trust — and opened wallets

Netflix has fundamentally changed the economics of its advertising business. Less than a year after replacing Microsoft’s ad technology with its own in-house platform — Netflix Ads Suite, or NAS — advertiser spending on the streaming service has doubled in some cases, and previously reluctant brands are buying in for the first time. The catalyst, executives across multiple agencies agree, is deceptively simple: for the first time, the measurement actually works.

The Problem NAS Was Built to Solve

When Netflix launched its ad-supported tier in 2022, the industry was skeptical — and for good reason. The underlying infrastructure was borrowed. Netflix relied on Microsoft’s ad technology to route buys through demand-side platforms, but what it offered bore little resemblance to the targeting precision and measurement transparency that programmatic advertising is supposed to deliver.

Doug Paladino, Senior Director of CTV and Programmatic Strategy at PMG, put it plainly: “I wouldn’t call what they were running before ‘programmatic.’ It executed through DSPs, but it didn’t bring the promise of programmatic: targeting, measurement capabilities.” Advertisers were spending money without knowing where it went or what it did.

Against a backdrop of accelerating linear TV ad dollar migration to streaming, Netflix was leaving significant money on the table. NAS, launched in April 2025, was the direct response.

Three Shifts That Changed Everything

The transformation NAS delivered can be broken into three components. First: precision targeting. Advertisers can now buy Netflix inventory through major third-party DSPs — The Trade Desk, Yahoo DSP among them — while layering in proprietary audience segments built from viewing behavior: genre preferences, interest signals, and lookalike targeting to expand reach beyond known audiences.

Paladino described the unlock in concrete terms. “The main unlock that I want from them they now have: ‘Let me send you an audience and tell me everything that you know about them. What are they watching? What genres do they over-index for? Which upcoming shows that have season 2 coming out do they over-index for that I might want to sponsor?’ They’re giving me all that now, plus lookalikes.”

“Unlocking measurement has unlocked confidence in Netflix”
— Doug Paladino, Senior Director of CTV & Programmatic Strategy, PMG

Second: measurement. Netflix has expanded its roster of third-party measurement vendors — including iSpot.tv — enabling apples-to-apples performance comparisons against other media. Carrie Drinkwater, Chief Investment Officer at Dentsu’s Carat, called it “the gateway”: “The full targeting-measurement integration really was the gateway to help create more revenue for them and more opportunities for us.”

Third: the data clean room. Tinuiti has been testing Netflix’s clean room via Snowflake, building toward what Harry Browne, VP of TV, Audio and Display Innovation, described as “deterministic, one-to-one attribution to Netflix, which previously was not possible.” Early results are striking — cost-per-visit and cost-per-acquisition metrics beating industry benchmarks for several advertisers. The clean room remains in testing, but the direction is clear.

The Numbers Tell the Story

Multiple agency executives, speaking anonymously, confirmed the financial picture. Some advertisers have doubled their Netflix spend year over year. Top brands are up 50% or more. “Investment is definitely going up, especially in Q4 and Q1,” Browne said. “We’re starting to see more investment in Netflix than we were earlier last year.”

The audience backdrop supports the momentum. Netflix’s U.S. ad-supported tier now reaches 57 million monthly active viewers — Nielsen-verified, the company told agency executives — at CPMs that have drifted into the low $20s and occasionally below $20 for non-targeted inventory. The combination of scale, data depth, and improving unit economics is proving persuasive.

Drinkwater framed NAS not as a trigger but as infrastructure: “I don’t think the introduction of NAS was like a ‘go’ button. I think it was opening a larger stream.” The implication is that spending growth has a structural momentum that will compound as agencies deepen their data integrations.

The Work That Remains

NAS has not solved everything. The most frequently cited friction is measurement vendor fragmentation. Netflix has coverage in each category, but not necessarily the specific vendor a given agency — or client — prefers. The result: gaps in cross-platform de-duplication.

Paladino gave a specific example: a quick-service restaurant brand using a particular store-visit measurement vendor found that Netflix had integrated a different one. “They can report store visits, but it’s not de-duped alongside the rest of our media,” he said. A year ago, he noted, that level of specificity in the critique wouldn’t even have been possible — there was nothing to compare against.

His assessment of where Netflix stands: “They’ve checked the box with something in each category and now are going back and adding numbers two and three in each category. So they’re getting there.” The direction is right; the execution is ongoing.

■  Analysis | What This Means for K-Content and the FAST Market

Netflix’s strengthening ad economics has direct implications for Korean content. A more profitable ad-supported tier translates into greater capacity for original content investment — and Netflix has consistently deepened its commitment to Korean originals. For K-FAST channel operators, NAS’s maturation is a double signal: the streaming ad market is growing, but the bar for targeting precision and measurement is rising. Platforms that cannot match that standard risk losing ad budgets to premium inventory.

The Bottom Line

NAS has proved a principle that the streaming industry had theorized but never fully demonstrated at scale: when measurement works, advertisers spend more. Netflix went from a platform where agencies couldn’t properly track outcomes to one where Tinuiti is reporting clean-room attribution results that beat industry benchmarks — in less than twelve months.

The road ahead includes full clean room commercialization, continued vendor ecosystem expansion, and pressure from rivals who will not stand still. Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Peacock are all building or upgrading their own ad stacks. But Netflix has moved first and moved fast. The streaming ad wars have entered a new phase — and Netflix, for now, has the momentum.