When this episode was first pitched to me, my exact words were: “Imagine having Netflix, Spotify and Amazon in one conversation. I will literally drop dead. This is my Super Bowl.”
I did not drop dead, but we did get all three on the same couch. Willie Pang, Managing Director of Amazon Ads ANZ. Zarak Khan, who leads ad sales solutions across APAC for Netflix. Liam Hickey, head of automation for Spotify across JPAC. On paper, these are three companies fighting over the same forty minutes of your evening, and they sat in one studio to talk about why they’ve decided to make each other easier to buy.
If you’re not in ad land, programmatic is the plumbing. Instead of a brand negotiating separately with every streaming service, it buys audiences through one platform that plugs into all of them. Netflix and Spotify have both opened their inventory to the Amazon DSP, so a retailer can now plan Netflix, Spotify and Prime Video side by side, against the same audience, and measure what people went on to buy. That matters more here than almost anywhere. As Willie points out, retail is the biggest advertising category in Australia, at north of $2 billion a year.
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→ The number that should make every CMO sit up. Willie’s back-of-envelope maths: a 34% improvement in return on ad spend, applied to retail’s $2 billion, is somewhere around $600 to $700 million in efficiency. That’s money you could put back into content, product and the kind of in-store experience people actually talk about. As he puts it, most of us have spent our careers fighting for a 2 or 3% improvement.
→ 1% overlap. Liam shares a UK campaign where a CPG brand ran Prime Video and Spotify together and found only 1% of the audience overlapped. Until recently, reaching those two groups meant two separate buys and two sets of reports that never matched up.
→ “You don’t accidentally end up watching Netflix.” Zarak’s case for attention is that people choose Netflix when they want to properly pay attention, so the attention isn’t rented. His advice for your next media plan is to remember that not all reach is equal. He also brings a Kantar stat worth stealing: brands that attach themselves to culturally relevant moments grow up to six times faster.
→ Audio is still treated as a bolt-on, and Liam isn’t having it. When he joined Spotify in 2018, audio was a test-and-learn line item. Now there are 494 million ad-supported listeners, growing 14% a year, but planners still start with video and commerce and add audio at the end. His advice is to plan around where the audience actually spends its time.
→ Selling a hundred hammers. This is my favourite stretch of the episode. Willie describes a retailer telling the system in plain English that it wants to sell a hundred hammers, and the system working out which Netflix show to put the brand ad in, which podcast should help you choose between hammer A and hammer B, and whether the sale ends up online or in store. For anyone who’s lived through spreadsheets on spreadsheets of retail media planning, that’s the dream.
→ Looking forward instead of backward. Willie makes the point that marketing has always worked in reverse: who bought my thing, and will they buy it again? The shift is towards predicting who is likely to be open to your brand next, using real intent signals (what people watched to the end, what they listened to, what they bought) rather than modelled guesses.
My read: everything in this conversation is about AI taking over the fiddly parts of placing ads. That’s genuinely good news, because it frees marketers to spend their energy on the part no platform can do for them, which is building a brand people are obsessed with. The plumbing is getting solved. Showing up in culture is still your job.
So, if you could hand the whole media plan to the machine tomorrow, would you know what to do with the time you got back?
Thirty-seven minutes. Go listen.
Brooke x
MOODY is Australia’s answer to the serendipity Americans take for granted. The room where founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives are in the same group chat, and it turns out they needed each other. These are the girls who get it and we are in a MOOD.
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