Not for the first time, Netflix has reason to give thanks for Stranger Things. When Campaign Asia arrives at the streaming giant’s APAC headquarters to meet its president of ads, Amy Reinhard, the fifth season of the hit series is hurtling towards its conclusion, and Bangkok’s Song Wat Road is about to be transformed into a themed party, the latest in a series of spectacular activations across multiple cities.
Christmas Day 2025 became Netflix’s most-watched 24 hours ever. If it’s not quite enough to make you forget the business has just become embroiled in one of the most fractious takeover sagas of recent times, it’s certainly a diverting distraction.
Reinhard is in Singapore because APAC is essential to the streamer’s future, regardless of whether it eventually adds Warner Bros Discovery to its corporate arsenal. That’s partly because so much of its most successful content is inspired by the region, and often made in it—think Squid Game and, in 2025, KPop Demon Hunters, which became the platform’s most successful movie, garnering 500 million views in a matter of months, inspiring a “pretty cool” multi-region partnership with McDonald’s and leading to a scramble for Halloween merchandise (“We had pitched it to a lot of retailers ahead of time,” says Reinhard. “They didn’t take us up on it and then it hit… we were caught kind of flat-footed”).
More importantly for Reinhard, APAC is also home to three of its 12 ad-supported tiers, whose introduction in 2022 was monumental not just for the business but also the Connected TV landscape. A year later, the company veteran—formerly in charge of content acquisition and later studio ops— was tapped to take over its fledgling commercial arm.
“We’ve talked publicly about seeing more than two-times [revenue] growth in 2025,” she says, expressing optimism over the “relatively low base” and excess capacity Netflix can access. “We’d expect that to continue into the future. As you get bigger, it gets harder to grow, but we are very encouraged by the amount of new advertisers we’re bringing on and what we’ve been able to do with our endeavours and our up-front negotiations.”
The timing is hardly incidental. Netflix’s proposed $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery—now complicated by Paramount’s hostile counterbid—has knocked more than 15% off its share price and sharpened investor focus on whether advertising can offset a more complex growth story.
In industry terms, Netflix barely registers as an ad market. It only just breaks into the top 10 Connected TV revenue generators and attracts a fraction of the spend of YouTube or US rival Hulu. It’s entered cautiously—the ad-supported tier, for example, is an option rather than an opt-out for subscribers—but as the biggest streamer, it won’t be long before the pressure to be top dog is overwhelming.
It also needs the revenue. Amazon and Disney+ are snapping at Netflix’s heels, and it is arguably reaching saturation point in organic subscriber growth, with its most recent reported numbers at 302 million in late 2024. The business says around 60% of new sign-ups opt for ads, including in APAC, putting its commercial audience at 190 million by late 2025.
That represented a doubling of 2024 figures, though crucially it came after Netflix changed its reporting methodology to be more “transparent”, creating a monthly average viewers (MAV) metric to take account of total household size while increasing the qualifying time for viewership to one minute. Reinhard says the switch reflected the increasing importance of live events, where “there’s always a question about how many people are actually sitting in front of the TV” and adds: “We’re not changing the way we’re selling on it, we’re just trying to give people a more accurate representation of what our reach is.”
Notably, Netflix in 2025 became the first streamer to be audited by Australian ratings provider OzTAM.
Whether this all represents positive progress depends on who you ask. Netflix says it is delighted with its commercial performance and trumpets partnerships with HP in Japan and the hugely popular Sudden Attack game in Korea, where players could become Squid Game characters. Co-CEO Greg Peters said it had its “best ad sales quarter ever” in Q3 2025, though it declined to offer exact numbers, just as it has stopped reporting subscribers. Reinhard believes ads will contribute 10% of Netflix’s revenue by 2030, and says there is “opportunity in being a late mover”, particularly by harnessing AI.
There have been grumbles, however.
Notably, the trade press has reported rumours of advertisers unhappy with Netflix’s CPM, but Reinhard believes it offers value “even at a premium price” and refuses to get drawn into a price war, swiping at the “tonne of litter or clutter in the experience” that could result if it chased volume at the expense of its brand.
“We like where we’re positioned,” she says. “We believe we’re a premium offering—we have light adverts, we’ve got frequency caps, all these things we’re doing to make sure we resonate with members, advertisers benefit from that as well. We’re not going to be cutting price and being a price play. We believe there’s a real benefit to what we’re bringing to the table for advertisers.”
Market share, too, has been a sticking point. Reinhard says Netflix has been “chipping away” at concerns from advertisers on scale and believes the most important metric is market share relative to viewing share. “When we rally around an initiative within the company, we’re set on making it work, and I feel that’s definitely been proven over the course of the last 18 months.”
It’s certainly backing its goals with hard cash. Netflix Ads Suite, launched in 2024, has reduced reliance on Microsoft and other third-party tools. In Australia, adds Reinhard, “we want to lean heavily into programmatic”, and she sees the country as the leading market for a move away from direct relationships with brands and agencies, which will help the ad offer scale. A partnership with Amazon’s DSP offers direct access to Netflix inventory globally.
“If we don’t deliver innovation and tech [in ads], we’re not delivering a service to Netflix because we’ve done that so well in terms of member experience,” says Reinhard. The first half of the year will see “dozens” of modular interactive ad formats launching, having been tested in the US market, and Netflix is also utilising AI to “jump on opportunities” for quick-turnaround creative against particularly popular programmes. Advertisers can deploy first-party data on the Netflix platform—in this respect, it is playing catch-up with rivals—and the next stage may be personalised ad flows that make ad serving as intuitive as the platform’s famous consumer interface.
“Right now we’re limited in terms of the formats we have, so we want to make sure we’re being more innovative in where ads show up on the platform and how they look different in that hour-long programme, without burdening the user or detracting from the member experience,” says Reinhard.
In APAC specifically, the World Baseball Classic in Tokyo in March, Netflix’s first live broadcast outside the US, will be a “huge test”. Japan has “taken time”, adds Reinhard, in contrast to Korea, where she namechecks a Squid Game collaboration with the Korea Tourism Organisation.
Reinhard also mentions the One Piece manga adaptation and Korean reality show Physical 100 as content that is translating beyond borders, and says the concept of exporting ideas extends to advertising. “We’re getting a lot of advertisers in the region who’ve seen early success in a country and now are looking to purchase media throughout other areas of the world. We’re trying to figure out how to tackle this from an organisational perspective. It gets complex in terms of what advertisers have centrally [in terms of buying]; we have to work with our regional leaders. A lot of it is how we work with agencies, the creative aspects of that.”
Will that lead to an extension in the number of ad markets? Reinhard says the current dozen represent “85% of what we think the advertiser tail is” and that decisions on future deployment will come down to subscriber demand as well as proximity to current markets and similarities in agency structure. It’s not currently something the business is actively considering, she adds, offering the same answer to the possibility of a freemium tier that would massively increase user numbers while uprooting the current brand proposition: should it eventually happen, there would be “no reason to exclude” the APAC region.
In the meantime, there are enough elephants in the room. The Warner Bros bid is very much in play but faces multiple regulatory and financial hurdles before Reinhard can consider the implications of accessing a treasure trove of new content and subscribers. “We only know what we know,” she says. “We have so much low-hanging fruit we have to go after in terms of our natural progression in this marketplace… don’t be distracted by everything you’re hearing.”
It’s a task, you suspect, that might be easier said than done over the coming months.
