In my career, I’ve always been attracted to brands that create a deep connection with their fans — whether it’s VOGUE or Spotify. But I’ve never felt the kind of love from people that I feel since I started working at Netflix.
When they find out, they want to talk about their favorite shows and movies. And I love doing it, too!
Of course everyone loves big, global sensations like Emily in Paris, Bridgerton, and The Night Agent. But we also have local series like The Leopard from Italy, Lupin from France, Helicopter Heist from Sweden and The Gentlemen from the UK that have attracted audiences all over the world.
This also includes some hugely popular German series. For example, I know you all grew up knowing about Sisi, but I wasn’t familiar with her story until I watched The Empress. I absolutely loved the costumes and the chemistry.
And the Kaulitz and Kaulitz show is truly insane. Their banter and all the behind-the-scenes moments are so entertaining. And I had no idea that Tom is married to Heidi Klum.
That variety and quality is why Netflix has become the go-to option for more than 700 million people looking for their next obsession. Our trailers alone generate over 7 billion impressions every month on Netflix — more than 40x what they get on YouTube.
And a lot of the conversation around those titles happens on social media, where we have over 1 billion followers — one of the largest and most passionate fan bases of any brand in the world. Last year alone, our social channels generated almost 150 billion organic impressions.
It helps explain why our shows and movies influence everything from what people search for, to the music they listen to, to the books they read. And the great thing is, it drives more people back to Netflix. Creators love it too because it means bigger audiences for their stories.
That’s why many people look at my job and think it must be easy. And in some ways it is. But, like all of your jobs, mine also has its challenges.
These days, entertainment is incredibly competitive.
In addition to television and films, there are all the other ways people can spend their time — listening to Spotify, gaming on Twitch, browsing TikTok, or scrolling through Instagram.
When you think about it, it’s actually amazing that any of us can get people to do anything for more than a few seconds.
That’s why it’s such a challenge to get our members to come back — day after day, month after month. But the best way to do it is by connecting with and inspiring fans. Because, as we like to say at Netflix, ‘fandom solves almost all known problems’.
So today, I want to share four lessons I’ve learned, about how to create and sustain that fandom. And because we’re Netflix, I’ve got some familiar faces to help me do it.
Lesson one: Be a great dance partner
How many of you have seen the Wednesday dance that went viral a couple years ago?
And how many of you knew that “Bloody Mary” — the Lady Gaga song that played in the background — wasn’t even in the show? It’s true. A fan sped it up … did the dance to it … and posted it. Then our team got in touch with Lady Gaga, who filmed herself dancing to the track.
When it first came out in 2011, “Bloody Mary” didn’t get a ton of traction. It wasn’t a single, and it didn’t have a music video. But after the Wednesday phenomenon 11 years later, it made the Top 100 charts in more than a dozen countries.
Season 2 of Wednesday is coming out this summer, and it’s going to be even bigger and more twisted than Season 1. And rumor has it Lady Gaga may make a cameo… but we’ll all have to wait and see.
Traditionally, brand marketing has been about expressing a company’s values to the world and trying to connect with people. But engaging consumers today — especially Gen Z — requires a different approach.
That’s why we try to show up wherever people are talking — especially on social media. On TikTok, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn, we’re the number one entertainment brand, by far.
It’s all about helping our fans feel a tangible connection to our brand and our values so they’ll keep coming back.
Lesson two: It’s not always the usual suspects
In marketing, some hits are relatively easy to predict.
For example, one of our first big movies of the year was Back in Action starring Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz. You don’t need to be an expert to know that a lot of people are going to press play on that — including in Germany, which is why we held the global premiere in Berlin.
But Back in Action is not our biggest title of 2025.
That distinction belongs to a small British drama series that is already our third most popular English language show of all time. Over the last couple of months, it’s sparked a global conversation about children and social media — from dinner tables, to the halls of power.
For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, Adolescence is not an easy watch — especially if you’re a parent. But it’s a powerful one – the story of how a family’s world is turned upside down, when their 13 year old son is arrested and charged with the murder of a teenage girl.
A couple weeks after Adolescence came out, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he had watched it with his teenage kids. Today, it’s available to all secondary schools across the UK through our partnership with Into Film — a leading UK charity for film in education.
You see, sometimes the most brand-defining hits are not the flashiest. They’re the ones that hit on something real, something true, something that can be hard to articulate.
That’s why you can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to entertainment or marketing.
The campaign we ran to support Back in Action would not have worked for Adolescence. And even for Adolescence, our strategy in the UK was different than it was in the U.S.
As marketers, it’s important to understand what makes something special — and play into those strengths. Discovering the right approach is hard work, but when you find it, the impact can be bigger than you could have ever imagined.
Lesson three: There are many portals to the Upside Down
Stranger Things taught us that you can create an entire world within a world, complete with portals between them. We try to do the same thing — only instead of keeping the Demogorgons out, we use portals to bring the fans in.
In marketing, we love giving people a clear, linear journey to follow. But life is messy. Attention spans are short. And sometimes there’s a mismatch between how we want people to experience our brands and how they actually experience them.
That’s why, instead of building roads with a single destination, we try to build worlds that fans can explore on their own.
For example, last year we opened our first stage show — Stranger Things: The First Shadow — on the West End in London. And last month, it opened on Broadway in New York City. It’s a prequel for fans who can’t get enough, and a way for new fans to experience the Stranger Things universe for the first time.
Leading up to the fifth and final season, we’re coming out with an animated series, and we’ve partnered with brands on everything from fitness classes, to jewelry to books.
Because our fans don’t just want to watch a show — they want to live it. That’s especially true for a show like Stranger Things that has been a part of our lives for a decade — and it’s why we always want to give fans more to discover.
Lesson four: Take a leap of faith
With so much information at our disposal, it can be hard to take chances. People start thinking, “Does this partnership really make sense for our brand?” or “With all the options out there, should we really be doing this?”
And look, I get it. Marketing is scary, because if something doesn’t work out it could cost us our jobs. We also face internal pressure to constantly evolve, and sometimes the things we want to invest in don’t have an immediate impact on the bottom line.
So making a bold choice feels risky. But playing it safe is risky, too — because it means we’ll never find out what works and what doesn’t.
That’s why it’s so important to get out in the market, experiment with a bunch of ideas, and see what sticks. And then keep doing it.
You can’t just be one and done.
In fact, some of our most popular marketing campaigns were big risks.
To promote the third season of the French series Lupin about a master thief, we decided to mimic the ads of luxury brands — but with the items themselves conspicuously missing.
And leading up to Season 7 of Black Mirror, we launched a fake tech company and all the elements of a big product launch, with zero Netflix or Black Mirror branding.
It was only after watching the show that fans began to realize that the product they were seeing all over the internet was actually a fake piece of tech from the new season.
We also released a mobile game so fans who watched the fourth episode of the season could explore the same themes of obsession, power, and the nature of human purpose that they saw in the episode.
But as fun as they are, those are just tactics. The real key is setting up your team in a way where everyone feels comfortable being innovative and creative — and aren’t afraid to fail.
At Netflix, our marketing team is not primarily measured by how many impressions we get or how much ROI we generate. Instead, we’re judged by how much conversation we drive and how much fandom we create. And that’s what our brand is all about.
And my job is to encourage my team to take big swings, because while it’s easy to get sucked into short-term thinking, fortune favors companies that are willing to take chances and stick to their convictions.
So those are four lessons we think about whenever we get ready to promote Netflix or one of our shows or films. Follow your audience. Play to your strengths. Create worlds for fans to explore. And don’t be afraid to try something new.
And since showing is always better than telling, I want to end by showing you what it looks like when all those lessons come together perfectly.
These days, it’s easy to look back at Squid Game and think that it was destined to be a hit. But at the time, it was one of the hardest titles to market outside of Korea. It was a show made for Koreans, by Koreans. The cast was unknown in most parts of the world. It touched on some pretty serious themes like class and inequality. Oh, and almost everyone dies.
That’s why we planned a pretty big pre-launch campaign in Korea. But because we weren’t sure if it would resonate broadly, we didn’t start off promoting it anywhere else.
As you can see, on day one and two, Koreans really loved it.
And as it grew, Netflix started showing Squid Game to people who’d watched titles with similar attributes, even if they hadn’t watched Korean shows before. You can see that over time, fans in the Americas, Europe and all over the world are really starting to discover it.
Then our marketing team jumped in to amplify the conversations fans were already having. And you can see how huge it got. In the first month, there were more than 50 billion TikTok views under the Squid Game hash tag.
Squid Game went on to be our biggest show ever. It was in the Global Top 10 on Netflix for 22 weeks. That’s more than half a season in the Bundesliga.
And after the initial wave passed, we extended the universe for fans — with custom products, live experiences, a video game, and an unscripted show called Squid Game: The Challenge, where more than 456 real players got to compete for 4.56 million dollars.
Leading up to Season 2, we partnered with some incredible brands — from Johnnie Walker, WhatsApp and DuoLingo, to Burger King, Sky Germany and Xbox — to give fans even more ways to connect with the show.
And now that Season 3 is coming out next month — bringing an end to this incredible, record-breaking journey — we’re going all out again.
For example, we’re releasing an update to Squid Game: Unleashed — one of our biggest games to date — with new characters, challenges and games from the new season. And we’ll have even more exciting partnerships with brands, including returning collaborations with Puma, KFC and many more.
None of the things I’ve talked about change the fact that there’s more competition than ever for people’s time and it’s harder to get their attention. That’s just the new reality.
But at Netflix, we’ve tried to prove that if you respect your audience, if you have conviction and if you play the long game, you can win people’s attention. And not for a few seconds at a time. For hours at a time — week after week, month after month, year after year.
And that’s how you build a deep, meaningful relationship with your fans — and create a brand that stands the test of time.
