Nicolle Pangis Joins Netflix as VP Advertising

Oct 30, 2024

By Brian Steinberg

Senior TV Editor

Nicolle Pangis, a former CEO of the cable-ad-sales entity Ampersand, will join Netflix as its new vice president of advertising, a role that has not been easy to navigate at the streaming giant as it seeks to make dollars from Madison Avenue a bigger part of its overall business plan.

Pangis enjoys “a great reputation within our industry, both for the depth of her relationships with clients and partners, and her data-driven approach to streaming advertising,” said Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, in a statement. “Together, we’ll continue to build and scale a great ads business for our clients and Netflix.”

Netflix joined the battle for video advertising about two years ago, but media buyers say the streamer has not been as successful in the fray as rival Amazon. Both companies produce some of the most-buzzed-about programs and series available, but Amazon has proven more willing to push its ad-supported tier, making it the de factor product for its Prime Video service. Netflix, though its makes its ad-supported option avaialble globally, has yet to generate the scale of consumer impressions that big advertisers require in order to widen volume and sponsorship.

Netflix has overhauled its ad-sales team in noticeable fashion, ousting both of the senior executives it initially hired to supervise the effort. Peter Naylor, a veteran who has worked for NBCUniversal, Hulu and Snap, exited the streamer in July — in the midst of the industry’s annual “upfront” market, when media companies try to win the bulk of advertising support for the next year. Jeremi Gorman, his previous superior, left in October of last year.

Netflix saw subscriptions to its ad supported tier grow 34% in the third quarter of 2024, and executives believe the service is on track to generate the scale advertisers want in 2025. Pangis is tasked with overseeing ad sales in the U.S. and Canada.

“It takes time to build new initiatives to the point where they’re significant given that we already have a fairly large core business,” said Greg Peters, co-CEO of Netflix, during the company’s last earnings call with investors. “Ads is a great example of how we approach growing these seeds. It takes a lot of work, but we know the path, and we’re hustling to move down that path as quickly as possible – and you can see some of the benefits that we’re getting. But it’s off a small base, so it starts to become a material contributor of revenue over the next several years.”

At Ampersand, Pangis helped to create new businesses out of the ad-sales the company regularly does for inventory owned by its backers, Comcast, Charter and Cox Communications. She focused on so-called “addressable” advertising, or commercial inventory that can be sent governed by specific data about consumers, such as geography or interest in a particular product or service. Before taking the role at Ampersand, Pangis held senior roles at GroupM, the large media-investment agency that is part of British advertising giant WPP.

She is an independent board member at Madhive, a company that helps advertisers optimized their spending.

She earned her MBA in Strategic Management and Marketing from Rutgers University and completed her BS in Communication with an English minor from Boston University in three years.