Streamers are building out their global businesses, and advertising isn’t far behind

In its Q1 2024 letter to shareholders released last month, Netflix announced that its quarterly earnings reports will look a little bit different next year. Starting in Q1 2025, it will no longer report quarterly membership numbers and average revenue per membership—a decision, the company said in the letter, that is partly the result of its increasingly global business, which features a variety of price points in the different countries that Netflix operates in.

The move is perhaps indicative of the increasingly global reality for many streamers on the market. Later this month, Warner Bros. Discovery will roll out Max in Europe, for instance (earlier this year, it became available in Latin America and the Caribbean as well); other streamers, like Disney+ and Paramount+, are already available in many international markets. As streamers continue looking abroad for more growth at the same time that they bolster their ad-supported tiers, some agency execs are anticipating a benefit to the ad-buying process, particularly for large, international advertisers. However, there are still kinks that will need to be worked out if it is to go smoothly.

“While a lot of the conversations within the video upfronts have been heavily rooted in US investment from advertisers or marketers,” Jake Marx, global head of partnerships at Stagwell Media Network, told Marketing Brew, “this is now going to be an opportunity to expand some of the video upfront conversations to be on a global level.”

Win-win situation?

Streamers aren’t the only ones who could stand to benefit from continued international expansion. For agencies, an expansion of a streamers’ footprints could translate into an opportunity to access first-to-market opportunities and test new ad formats, Marx said. “That will only help both the streaming service side of things, but also the buy side, meaning agencies and their advertisers.” (Some of Stagwell’s creative agencies, including Movers + Shakers and Team Epiphany, have worked with Netflix and Max.)

Streamer globalization could also be useful to brands that agencies work with, according to Kasha Cacy, chief media officer at independent shop Known, which has worked on creative, production, and brand strategy for Max.

“Traditionally, media, unlike creative, has been very local, because there were quite frankly, so few global ad platforms,” Cacy told Marketing Brew. That has translated to some inefficiencies for global clients, she added.

“The idea of more and more streamers globalizing is super appealing, and it would be appealing from a global pricing leverage [perspective],” she said. “Quite frankly, in the past, you could only sort of leverage the dollars you have in a country with a specific set of media partners versus at a global scale.”

Started from the bottom

Making those opportunities a reality, though, could be easier said than done, and Cacy said she has observed some potential challenges that streamers may need to work out.

“When we tried to do this, [we found that] the sales organizations tend not to be built to make those global deals yet,” she said. Beyond that, she said, the quality of inventory can vary from country to country.

“We’ve worked with streamers who are considered premium in the US, and when we’ve tried to make deals with them at a global level in other countries, the inventory that they had was significantly less premium and less rich than what they have in the US,” Cacy said. That can—and has, in Cacy’s past experiences—caused some hiccups, she told us.

Steven Frey, director of integrated media planning at independent shop Media by Mother, said that while international expansion can introduce new opportunities, it can also mean increased complexity for media buyers and creative work alike.

“It just takes a lot of those already confusing fast-moving dynamics, and then it multiplies them,” he said.