As consumer viewing habits evolve from watching TV as a group activity to viewing

content alone online, the delightful banter, heckling each other over their viewing

choices and gut reactions to what’s playing on screen -- an essential part and fun of our

viewing pleasure -- is unfortunately lost. Netflix believes great content shouldn’t just

speak to you, but it should also talk back. To bring back the banter and sass of watching

TV together, Netflix used classic scenes and characters from Netflix Original shows and

combined it with YouTube’s new real-time programmatic ad creation technology to

create personalized sassy 6-second quips. These quips are always contextual to the

target audience’s search queries, providing high entertainment value while showing off

its shows.

Netflix identified over 2,000 search queries to generate the same number of

personalized quips against in real time using 30 base films from six Netflix Original titles

and responsive copy combinations. Over a six-week campaign period, the quips that

were generated covered not just the usual search queries, but responded to key

calendar events in the Philippines and Singapore such as Valentine’s Day, Lunar New

Year, Sinulog and Super Bowl. The programmatic approach allowed Netflix to deliver

personalized stories at scale, re-target organically and travel upstream to connect with

our target audience at the search intersect to generate high entertainment value and

local relevance.

At campaign end, Netflix achieved 11 million impressions and a 30% lift in brand

awareness among the target demographic, emerging as the leader among competitors

in the same countries with recall scoring two times more compared to past single-title

campaigns. This response is significant in shifting perception of Netflix and expanding

its awareness beyond a “Catchup TV / movie-on-demand” service to establishing Netflix

as a provider of original dramatic content.