Netflix's Ads Tier Launches With 'High Quality' Advertisers: Lightshed

Netflix’s foray into advertising, the Basic with Ads tier, launched with a “high quality list of advertisers,” LightShed Partners analyst Rich Greenfield wrote investors Thursday on first impressions of the $6.99 monthly service. The list of 30 advertisers Greenfield noted Friday, after the first day with the service, included Beats, Buick, CBS, Cerave, Duracell, Experian, Google Pixel, Holiday Inn, Michelob and Target. Greenfield noted a “surprising number of luxury retail brands,” with Bulgari, Tiffany, Prada and Louis Vuitton, but only one insurance company, Progressive. “Interestingly, there were no telecom companies,” he said. Greenfield reported a mixed bag of results, with Seinfeld having no ads at all, but Stranger Things starting with a 30-second pre-roll for Apartments.com. When he clicked to the end of the first episode, he was fed 75 seconds of ads “since we jumped over multiple ad breaks” for Best Western, GMC, Garnier and Tiffany, Greenfield said. An effort to skip the ads put him in another 75-second cycle, this time for Sleep Number, Target and Booking.com. The Netflix homepage showed no ad units; they were all inside individual shows or movies, he said. “The irony of seeing linear TV ads on Netflix,” said the analyst: “Who would have ever imagined that?”