Nicolle Pangis, a former CEO of cable ad sales entity Ampersand, will join Netflix as its new vice president of advertising, a role that hasn’t been easy to fill at the streaming giant as it tries to cash in on Madison Avenue dollars. a larger part of the overall business plan.
Pangis enjoys “a great reputation within our industry, both for the depth of its relationships with customers and partners, and its data-driven approach to streaming ads,” Amy Reinhard, president of Advertising at Netflix, said in a statement. “Together we will continue to build and scale a great advertising business for our customers and Netflix.”
Netflix joined the video advertising fray about two years ago, but media buyers say the streamer hasn’t been as successful in the battle as rival Amazon. Both companies produce some of the most talked-about shows and series around, but Amazon has proven to be more willing to push its ad-supported tier, making it the factor product for its Prime Video service. While Netflix is making its ad-supported option available globally, it still needs to generate the scale of consumer impressions that major advertisers need to increase volume and sponsorships.
Netflix has made a dramatic overhaul of its ad sales team, ousting both senior managers it initially hired to oversee the effort. Peter Naylor, a veteran who has worked at NBCUniversal, Hulu and Snap, left the streamer in July — in the middle of the industry’s annual “upfront” market, when media companies try to capture the bulk of the coming year’s advertising support .
Netflix saw subscriptions to the ad-supported tier grow 34% in the third quarter of 2024, and executives believe the service is on track to reach the scale advertisers want by 2025. Pangis is charged with overseeing advertising sales in the US and Canada.
“It takes time to build new initiatives to the point where they are significant, as we already have a fairly large core business,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said during the company’s latest earnings call with investors. “Ads are a good example of how we approach growing these seeds. It takes a lot of work, but we know the path, and we are doing our very best to get on that path as quickly as possible – and you can see some of the benefits we get. But it’s on a small base, so it’s starting to make a material contribution to revenues in the coming years.”
At Ampersand, Pangis helped create new businesses from the ad sales the company regularly makes for inventory owned by its backers, Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. She focused on so-called “addressable” advertising, or commercial inventory that can be sent based on specific data about consumers, such as geography or interest in a particular product or service. Before taking on the role at Ampersand, Pangis held senior positions at GroupM, the major media investment agency that is part of British advertising giant WPP.
She is an independent board member at Madhive, a company that helps advertisers optimize their spend.
She received her MBA in Strategic Management and Marketing from Rutgers University and completed her BS in Communications with a minor in English from Boston University in three years.