'Make Money Faster': What 'Emily in Paris' and a Leaked Netflix Memo Reveal About its Ad TierI talk to Peter Naylor and marketers about the dangerous game the streamer is playing as it blurs ads, shopping and content
This Ankler Feature is an 11-minute read. Down a swerving streetscape that evoked a shopping strip of a Paris arrondissement, guests who attended Netflix’s Los Angeles premiere for season four of Emily in Paris last month were in for a surprise. Sure, the on-demand crepe station was a nice touch (Have a Crepe Day! blared the wrappers in which they were served), as were recreations of Emily’s office and L’Esprit de Gigi, the restaurant run by Gabriel (Lucas Bravo).
Then things got weird. Mannequins wearing items featured on the show were strategically placed along the way, with a nearby “street” sign telling attendees “Shop with Google.” If you opened the Google app on your phone and used its AI-powered camera-based search product called Lens, you could see, for example, where to buy the lime green mule heels worn in the new season’s first scene by Mindy (Ashley Park) from the Italian designer Francesca Bellavita ($650). Or shoes that looked close enough to the real thing that cost far less. Along the way, a photographer offered people a Polaroid photo, which came emblazoned with “Shop with Google + Emily in Paris” on the picture’s signature white frame. Somehow what started as a Netflix premiere had morphed into a brand activation for Google’s visual search tool and its shopping. A week later, when part one of season four dropped on Netflix, the Google takeover continued on its ad tier. Emily in Paris was now brought to you by Google. An ad featuring Emily herself, Lily Collins, aired, showing her shopping for new shoes via Google Lens after she made the ultimate faux pas: wearing the same shoes as everyone else.
Stop a show and a new “pause ad” implores you to “lens this look.”
Whose show is this anyway? When did Netflix become a TikTok shop? Three and a half seasons into its run — part two of season four debuts Sept. 12 — Emily in Paris is not just a bona fide hit streaming franchise for Netflix but every marketer’s fantasy: It’s hard to tell where the commercials end and the show begins. As a result, Emily has become the petri dish for the streaming giant to remake advertising and product placement in its own image, and definitive proof that the streaming platforms are now trying to lay waste to another fiefdom of the cable and broadcast world: the kind of sought-after product integrations that drive huge ad buys. “What’s obvious is, with the exception of Netflix, that streaming is not as lucrative as the old way,” says Peter Naylor, who served as Netflix’s VP of ad sales until leaving in July. “So everyone is trying to figure out how to make money faster.” Ironically, it’s Netflix, with its already huge profitability lead over rivals, that’s the one chasing ad money the quickest of all. Pushing ProductLaunched in November 2020, amid the pandemic, the lightweight, fashion-heavy dramedy from Darren Star centers on a young female social media expert from Chicago who is adapting to life at a French luxury marketing agency that throws lavish brand parties every week. The show has been critically panned for stereotyping French people and for Emily’s “ridiculous” outfits, but no matter: Audiences have embraced it. Emily season four debuted at No. 1 on Netflix’s U.S. TV chart after its first four days, with 19.9 million views. Seasons one and three — which are now also brought to viewers by Google, the first time Netflix has sold the title sponsorship for a series in its library — landed in the ninth and tenth spots. The new season has remained in the Top 10 through Sept. 8. Brands, having seen the effectiveness of the show’s prior three seasons at pimping $1,000 Rimowa suitcases and even selling McDonald’s to the French, are now lining up to spray cash on Emily in Paris like it’s the Super Bowl on Champère, the undrinkable champagne featured on the show that, yes, is now an actual product you can buy.
It’s just one of the growing number of plot-lines turned products, as well as brand pitches turned plot-lines — all of it creating a shoppable TV slurry that does not seem to be an accident. When Netflix closed its upfront ad sales on Aug. 20, just days after Emily’s season four premiere, Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s president of advertising, said the company had signed up seven ad partners for Emily. In addition to Google, companies joining the fun include French luxury marketing giant LVMH (parent of Louis Vuitton and Rimowa), beauty player COTY Gucci, Spanish ready-to-drink coffee brand Kaiku Caffè Latte, airline Aeromexico and Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. But behind all the froth to get products onto Emily’s lithe frame — and into the frame of viewers’ Google Lens app — lies desperation and chaos. My sources repeatedly cited Netflix (and Amazon) as way out front in bringing product integration to streaming, but the grasping for dollars to prove that Netflix’s ad tier is working has brands confused and viewers increasingly agitated. “You can slowly implement change,” says one brand marketer, wishing for the bygone days of the more stolid processes of linear partners. “Instead, everything we used to do is now different. It has frustrated a lot of brands: They have these conversations, they’re excited about the content, and you start doing the dealmaking and it’s like the story changes every day.” How so? The Netflix ad team, they say, routinely feels out the market and sometimes overplays its hand on pricing. A quote might start at a shocking $5 million for a package, but then drops to $1 million to $2 million. Meanwhile, Netflix isn’t in as powerful a position as it thinks it is. It reported just 40 million monthly users of its ad tier last May, a fraction of its 278 million global subscribers. “We’ve been pursuing opportunities for our clients and Netflix can’t figure out if they’re willing to do it, or if they can do it, or if the brand has spent enough,” one entertainment marketer tells me. “Then ad sales has started to come into the conversations and they’re starting to make demands but brands quickly remind them, ‘You’re not even delivering against our current media commitments because the ad tier is so relatively small.’ It’s really stalled.” No one, though, expects this to remain the case. Pay for Play“My agency was proactively making 25 calls a day to get streaming platforms to respond to brand partnerships,” says Jarrod Moses, CEO of global marketing agency UEG. “Now it’s the opposite: We are receiving 30 calls, not just from streaming partners but from producers looking for brands to give them a lift.” Although this means, as Moses tells me, that “brands now are much more in control than before,” the streamer is pressing marketers that if they want a starring role on a show like Emily, they have to pony up multi-million dollar ad deals to access Netflix’s hit series. Each deal also has to get signed off by the show’s producers, Paramount Global, before it can move ahead. As Netflix’s ad business closes out its second year this November, its conversations with agencies are changing, making it harder to bypass its advertising team. Moses breaks down for me how when it comes to Emily, there are a number of ways marketers are partnering with the series:
“Everybody gets a share of the revenue that comes in from the brands,” says Moses, except in the rare cases “where the acquisition agreement has a buy-out clause to sell the integrations.” But the ad money is Netflix’s to keep. Brands Gone WildNaylor explains that the number-one rule of product integration is that the sales force needs to be as vigilant as anyone about protecting the show’s integrity, and that means pushing back on, say, automakers demanding that their vehicles are shown for 12 seconds. Of course, restraint is not exactly on display in Emily. Season four of the series has thus far worked a series of brands into the storylines for lots of airtime. Among them are Baccarat, which created a perfume bottle for sale in its stores, and luxury streetwear brand Ami Paris, which is featured as one of Emily’s clients. Ami also featured Emily and her former boyfriend Alfie in its advertising.
Business of Fashion reported that Netflix had approached luxury resale company Vestiaire Collective about a possible paid placement after the show’s writers crafted a scene where Mindy brings an expensive suit to the store for resale. Netflix and Paramount have been pushing out beyond the product mentions and appearances. Netflix, for example, created a mobile game, Netflix Stories: Emily in Paris, but Paramount is actively creating licensing opportunities for consumer products, whether they are featured in the show or not.
Glade air freshener hasn’t been featured during the series, but it is marketing a range of Emily-inspired scented candles in the TikTok shop. Last September Paramount Global licensed a travel package called “Paris by Emily” to Dharma, an Abu Dhabi-based tour operator, which has influencers treating visitors to fashion boutiques and sipping cocktails. Charaf El Mansouri, Dharma’s CEO, told the travel site Skift that Netflix could “potentially become the world’s biggest travel agency, given the latest wave of demand around traveling and streaming shows.” Part two of season four will take Emily to Rome. More typically, Quintessential Brands — a London-based spirits conglomerate — announced a partnership with MTV Entertainment Studios to make and market a ready-to-drink canned kir royale cocktail, called Chamère, inspired by a season three plotline. Yes, there are now real-world versions of both Chamère and Champère, two plot-to-product arrivistes with too-similar names, all of it as dizzying as having one too many. One marketer asserts that the cash-strapped Paramount Global is 100 percent responsible for the brand integrations, via Emily’s production company MTV Entertainment Studios. There’s a question as to whether Star is benefiting beyond however these integration deals offset production costs. Star did not return a request for comment via email. Paramount Global declined comment. Art of the Deal MemoThe deluge of brand mentions — not all of them paid promotions, at least not yet! — makes it appear that marketers are getting to call the shots. And Paramount in this instance certainly seems all too willing to say yes to any offers. But a sample Netflix deal memo I obtained sheds light on the nature of these brand agreements, at least from the streamer’s perspective. “The integration will occur in a minimum of X episodes during [Season Number] of the show,” it reads. “The placement will include visual exposure of the product, possible verbal mentions, and integration into key scenes that align with the show’s storyline.” In return, Netflix asserts creative control although allowing for the brand’s “input in how the product is portrayed to ensure it aligns with brand image, subject to Netflix’s final approval.” Brands pay extra for placement if Netflix exceeds viewership goals versus previous seasons. And for its part, the brand commits to social media promotion through its accounts and a royalty payment on sales of its products that can be directly attributed to show placement and integration. Shop ‘Til You DropInevitably, people wonder whether this mind-bending mélange of art and commerce can last. If there is a season five of Emily in Paris, brands are asking themselves whether it makes sense to join the party this late given how swamped the show is with so many other products. “You see the backlash on social media,” says the entertainment marketing executive. The New Yorker’s culture writer Kyle Chayka recently suggested that Netflix’s goal “is not just to spark viewers’ interest with original programming but to sustain their attention so that they will view more ads. This puts Netflix one step closer to digital platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, which run on the sheer volume of content, regardless of its quality.” Star, just like his creation Emily, recently left his employer, quitting MTV Entertainment Studios to join Universal Television earlier this year, leaving us with a cliffhanger for whether we’ll see a season five. But if not Emily, Netflix likely needs something to replace her, a brand-drunk, social shopping savant with one job: Get its ad tier a promotion. Additional reporting by Elaine Low and Matthew Frank
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