‘Experts in their field’: Netflix on embracing a culture of ‘context not control’

For a business the size of Netflix, building a cohesive marketing team that’s agile and not suffocated by procedure is no mean feat.

However, it’s something its marketing leadership emphasise in terms of team culture. The business has undergone changes in recent years and since launching its ad-supported tier in 2022, Netflix has evolved its approach to marketing to build a brand that attracts not just viewers, but advertisers.   

The pivot has been successful. Netflix’s ad tier hit 94 million monthly users globally last month, up from 40 million a year ago. 

But behind the brand sits a large marketing team working out of 30 offices globally. There are local teams and global teams, which for any brand can come with its own tensions.

Speaking to Marketing Week at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, senior director of marketing partnerships in the EMEA region, Jordan Peters, explains Netflix’s team culture plays a big role in its effectiveness as a marketing organisation.  

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“One of the distinctive things about our culture is this idea of context not control,” he says.

Team members are given the confidence and permission to make decisions regardless of hierarchy if they’re best placed.  

“Our vision is to entertain the world,” he says. “We’re driving conversation, but [the team] are the experts in their field and so we don’t have a hierarchical sign off system where one person – who is probably one of the least qualified actually to make a real decision in that market, in that language, to that audience – is signing everything off – because that slows everything down.”  

Netflix has “very talented teams who know their business really well”, he adds, and are “empowered” to do things in the moment.  

Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer of three years, emphasises the role of trust in working with teams across the globe and appreciating the cultural nuances that emerge.  

We don’t market in the same way in every country.

Marian Lee, Netflix 

A team in Australia, for example, may bring an idea to the table that raises questions.

“You’re like, is that really the best way to bring this to life?” she says. 

“But they know their audiences and if they want to spend their marketing dollars that way, great. It ends up being the thing where they really get the essence of what you’re trying to communicate to fans and then they bring their local market knowledge together and bring it to life.” 

Working with global and local teams, the marketing output for the same show can look different.  

“We don’t market in the same way in every country, I think it really depends,” says Lee.

She gives a recent example of how the press tour for Bridgerton’s third series saw Netflix take over the country town of Bowral, in New South Wales Australia.

“When that idea landed on my desk I was like ‘Is this, really? It’s not in Sydney?’” says Lee.

However, the activation turned out to be “amazing” for Netflix, the show, and its fans. 

“Those are the types of things [where] maybe it wouldn’t work in every market, so we always put a local lens [on the show],” she adds. 

Navigating teams in times of change

For many marketing teams, the emergence of AI is causing worries, from whether it’ll replace their jobs to how it will impact their skills and development.  

At Netflix, AI won’t be taking the marketing reins anytime soon, Lee insists. 

“From a marketing perspective, and just generally at Netflix, we’ve integrated AI into all personal productivity,” she explains.

The CMO gives the example of writing staff reviews and using AI to help in the early stages.

“I still need to read it and make changes, and put it into my voice,” she adds.  

Lee explains, for example, that the tools are not yet able to perfectly capture her tone of voice.

“Do I think they’re going to get better? Yes, every week I see new tools out there where the output is better and better,” she adds. 

But when it comes to AI in creative work, Netflix is staying away – for now.   

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“The one thing about AI is it will literally produce the outcome you asked for based on the dataset you have given it, which, by definition, means it will be generic,” says Peters. “It will be an averaging out of everything it has seen from the past.”  

Most brands want their marketing to achieve “cultural cut through by doing something new and unexpected”, adds Peters, which he claims AI won’t do.

He believes the AI-driven marketing campaigns brands have started producing can be “fun” in the first instance, but quickly he gets “pretty bored”. 

Instead, he believes AI will be an “incredible tool” for creative people to produce more creative work at scale, not from scratch but from “work that they’ve originated”.

However, there are some channels where AI makes more sense, suggests Lee. 

“We don’t use it in creative right now, but I would say for our social teams, those tools are already built in,” she says.

She references when a marketer posts on Facebook or Instagram, there are tools that automatically help with versioning and distribution. That said, a human needs to check, she insists.

“I would say that on social media, people are more forgiving if they notice a spelling mistake or if they notice something hasn’t been translated exactly right, because social is ephemeral, right? You’ve already moved on to the next thing,” says Lee. 

“But when you turn on Netflix, you expect perfection, so you don’t want a subtitle or a dub to be wrong. There’s different use cases for the [AI] tools.”  

That being said, Netflix has a combined billion followers across all its social platforms globally and has driven success by jumping on viral moments and making trends.  

Lee explains that what Netflix does on social is not the standard for its programming, but using AI is a practical way to save time in “certain instances”. 

While the creative output on the tools “is not there yet”, the Netflix CMO explains the team are not “ignoring them”.

“Every week, it’s pretty phenomenal how much change is happening, but we’re trying to use it [AI] in ways that just gives us time to do something more interesting, and so that’s an example of how we’re thinking about it now in marketing,” Lee adds. 

Marketing Week will be publishing more from the interview with Jordan Peters, head of marketing partnerships EMEA at Netflix. Read more from Cannes Lions 2025 here.