Last month, during Cannes Lions, Netflix announced that its ad inventory will be available to buy programmatically via Yahoo DSP.
This expansion of Netflix’s programmatic offerings couldn’t come at a better time for Pfizer. The pharmaceutical brand has been slowly moving many of its biddable media channels in-house – starting with search this past January, social in July and CTV coming up early next year.
Head of Performance Media Josh Palau, who previously shepherded Bayer through a similar in-house transition, told me that he’s especially excited by the combined potential of Yahoo and Netflix. Particularly, Yahoo’s bidding and targeting capabilities and Netflix’s “high-quality” content and audience, which was previously only accessible to Pfizer through direct deals.
After all, for many of Pfizer’s products, finding exactly the right audience is key – particularly when it comes to “people who suffer from a condition, or for health care providers who are treating conditions,” said Palau.
Netflix and Yahoo’s partnership likely won’t be available until early Q4 this year, according to Alia Lamborghini, SVP of Global Revenue at Yahoo DSP.
Here’s what else Palau had to say about how Pfizer currently navigates the CTV landscape, including why having your own hands-on-keyboard experts is key and how new ad formats can be slow to accommodate pharmaceutical brands.
AdExchanger: What are the benefits of moving biddable marketing channels in-house, as opposed to working with an agency?
JOSH PALAU: Part of it is you just have a deeper understanding of the brand. At an agency, you’re dragged into a bunch of different directions. You know the priorities of the brand, but you don’t understand the business because you don’t work there. You have different goals.
The other part is that we can just move much more quickly. You can open a platform and see what’s happening. We had a situation where that actually happened this week, and we were like, “Oh, wait, I see why this thing isn’t pacing right. I will fix it right now.” And that just doesn’t happen in the old relationship.
To me, the biggest benefit is that you, as a trader, become so much more valuable to the business. I’ve seen this interplay between brand marketers and channel activation people, and it just creates this really great cross-learning experience that makes everything better.
Are there any emerging or interactive CTV ad formats that you’re excited about being able to develop, either with Netflix or another streaming service?
Pause ads do well. The regular commercial breaks also do well within Netflix, as well as just CTV in general. But for us, it’s been less about the ad units and more about accessing the consumer that lives in that content world.
The industry has always thought about health as a big vertical, but it’s always the last vertical that gets figured out with all of these partners. By the time people come to us, they’ve already thought through these things already, like how you need a click-out so people can go and read our important safety information, or how you need to be able to run a 90-second spot.
So when we think about pause ads, we’re probably looking at two placements on the ad – one to send somebody to the website as a potential call to action and one from a legal standpoint to have what our disclaimers are.
Since you’re the “performance media” guy, how do you balance spending on performance and branding at Pfizer?
I think everything is performance; it’s just how you measure it. To compare linear TV to search is completely unfair, but to say that that one’s a performance channel and one’s not – I don’t know why brands ever do that. I don’t want to separate the budgets. So we look at things holistically.
Also, what I saw as a consumer living through COVID was the Pfizer brand mattered. Nobody knew what “Comirnaty” was, but that’s the name of the vaccine product. The brand matters. So I never want to move away from that.
How do you define “quality” for Pfizer’s purposes?
That’s another debate we have as an industry that we don’t really ever land on. I do think quality means different things to people.
The way that my team and I define quality is that it’s something we measure as a metric, like audience quality. So if we’re trying to reach people who suffer from migraines, are we reaching that? There are companies we work with that can give us a score that tells us how we’re doing.
Then the other piece for me is around content. Clearly, brand safety matters. So does the actual experience with how consumers are seeing the ad. And I think the last piece is, how many formats are available for us? How many creative types are available for us to be able to run more than just one simple ad?
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
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