Netflix's APAC marketer on placing creative first, media second

I believe there are several common principles that we should strive for across all our marketing work.

First, brands should earn attention before we buy it: which means thinking creative first, media second. The most valuable impressions come from those you trust – friends, influencers, press – and our creative work should start conversations to fuel word of mouth. We should be fluid in talking about the objective of our campaigns, rather than being governed by our media mix. This helps us to focus on developing truly great creative work and scale ideas beyond marketing.

To earn attention, we need to be hyper-local and hyper-relevant, and we need to create unmissable national moments with each and every campaign we deliver. This will pull consumers towards us and allow us to focus even more on creativity, and less on paid media.

When great creative work fuses owned, earned and paid media, we can create unmissable moments in our markets that generate so much excitement and spur customers to act.

Process inhibits great creativity. Creative approvals can increase the perception of risk and, over time, reduce the ambition of marketing teams. We should hire talented marketers with a deep connection to local culture, and encourage them to push for big ideas that will create big moments.

Second, digital is front-of-mind for us as we are developing campaigns. For example, Netflix works at the intersection of two of the most dynamic industries in the world: entertainment and technology, and to play a meaningful role in our members’ lives we need to captivate their imaginations where they spend most of their time.

Creating digital interactions with our fans is the most measurable and agile way to create a connection with our titles and brand. It’s also a great path to drive someone to watch our content. As a team, we continuously try to innovate in the way we approach digital publisher relationships, and develop creative and immersive campaigns built for the web.

This is where our target audience lives, and we should excite them with our content throughout their day. Finally, I believe personalisation will play an increasingly important role in the future of marketing.

Personalisation is core to the value proposition of our product, and we reflect this as best we can in our marketing efforts. Digital channels, in particular programmatic, afford us the luxury of running a multitude of creative assets to not only a large audience, but also in the most personalised way.

With the advancements in media targeting and an increasingly globally connected audience, we simply cannot project a bias on our audience. We need to develop campaigns that appeal to the diversity of consumer tastes.

Many of our original series are thematically rich and cut across genres, so we are able to showcase their many facets to multiple audiences through dynamic and adaptive media optimisation.

Our role as a marketing team is to identify and enhance these incredible characters and narratives within our shows, and expose them to audiences with the highest affinity for that content, whoever they may be.

The writer is James Rothwell, director of marketing, APAC, Netflix. The article first appeared in Marketing's The Futurist print edition.