Bad Streaming Ads Hurt Brands More Than Platforms, Omnicom Warns CMOs
CANNES, FRANCE — When viewers suffer through a poorly targeted or repetitive ad on a streaming service, they don’t blame Netflix or Disney. They blame the advertiser.
That is driving a wave of creative personalization deals between Omnicom Media Group and major streaming platforms, as the agency holding company races to solve what it sees as a “negative reach” problem plaguing connected TV.
The stakes are high. For the first time, CTV upfront ad spending is projected to surpass prime-time linear TV in 2026, with U.S. advertisers expected to commit $17.73 billion to streaming versus $16.98 billion for traditional prime time. Yet the creative experience on these platforms often lags behind the investment.
“If there’s a bad experience in streaming, consumers don’t blame the platform, they blame the brand,” said Megan Pagliuca, chief product officer at Omnicom Media Group, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions.
Netflix clean room unlocks viewing-based creative
Omnicom announced a string of partnerships with streaming giants this week, headlined by what Pagliuca described as the company’s first co-development project with Netflix.
“We actually can match Acxiom audiences to viewership within the Netflix clean room to really understand those audiences’ favorite shows and movies, and then personalize the creative experience aligned to those shows and movies,” Pagliuca said. The result, she explained, delivers ads that are “both contextually relevant to the platform and a much more personalized consumer experience.”
The Netflix deal represents a breakthrough after years of negotiation with the streamer, which only launched its ad-supported tier in late 2022. Pagliuca noted that Omnicom had been “trying to work on it for a couple of years, but they’re relatively new in the market.”
Disney, Paramount and NBCU get tailored approaches
Beyond Netflix, Omnicom struck creative personalization deals with Disney, Paramount, and NBCUniversal, each structured around the unique capabilities of the respective platforms. The Disney partnership builds on previous programmatic work, extending personalization into live sports and entertainment programming.
“Last year we worked with Disney on programmatic live. So it was the first time we could use programmatic signals for targeting in live,” Pagliuca said. “This year, we scaled that to the capability within creative personalization in live sports and live entertainment.”
Paramount’s deal targets the cultural moment around binge viewing. “Whenever they drop a new series, they often drop them in threes. We captured that unique unit, personalized it, and then built around that binge experience and that shared cultural moment,” Pagliuca explained. NBCUniversal’s collaboration goes deeper into content metadata, pulling episode and scene-level data from its clean room to inform creative decisions.
Cross-publisher measurement finally arrives
Perhaps the most significant technical advancement involves Acxiom’s multi-party clean room infrastructure, which enables measurement across streaming publishers for the first time. This capability addresses a longstanding frustration for marketers who have struggled to evaluate campaign performance holistically across fragmented streaming inventory.
“This is new and game-changing because you didn’t have that capability before this data collaboration infrastructure that Acxiom has taken to market,” Pagliuca said. The system also passes creative IDs through the measurement framework, giving Omnicom Production and creative partners visibility into performance at a granular level.
“You can see creative ID by audience, by frequency band, by outcome that can all inform creative personalization,” she added.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2026, produced in collaboration with NYSE. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
CANNES, FRANCE — When viewers suffer through a poorly targeted or repetitive ad on a streaming service, they don’t blame Netflix or Disney. They blame the advertiser.
That is driving a wave of creative personalization deals between Omnicom Media Group and major streaming platforms, as the agency holding company races to solve what it sees as a “negative reach” problem plaguing connected TV.
The stakes are high. For the first time, CTV upfront ad spending is projected to surpass prime-time linear TV in 2026, with U.S. advertisers expected to commit $17.73 billion to streaming versus $16.98 billion for traditional prime time. Yet the creative experience on these platforms often lags behind the investment.
“If there’s a bad experience in streaming, consumers don’t blame the platform, they blame the brand,” said Megan Pagliuca, chief product officer at Omnicom Media Group, in this video interview with Beet.TV at Cannes Lions.
Netflix clean room unlocks viewing-based creative
Omnicom announced a string of partnerships with streaming giants this week, headlined by what Pagliuca described as the company’s first co-development project with Netflix.
“We actually can match Acxiom audiences to viewership within the Netflix clean room to really understand those audiences’ favorite shows and movies, and then personalize the creative experience aligned to those shows and movies,” Pagliuca said. The result, she explained, delivers ads that are “both contextually relevant to the platform and a much more personalized consumer experience.”
The Netflix deal represents a breakthrough after years of negotiation with the streamer, which only launched its ad-supported tier in late 2022. Pagliuca noted that Omnicom had been “trying to work on it for a couple of years, but they’re relatively new in the market.”
Disney, Paramount and NBCU get tailored approaches
Beyond Netflix, Omnicom struck creative personalization deals with Disney, Paramount, and NBCUniversal, each structured around the unique capabilities of the respective platforms. The Disney partnership builds on previous programmatic work, extending personalization into live sports and entertainment programming.
“Last year we worked with Disney on programmatic live. So it was the first time we could use programmatic signals for targeting in live,” Pagliuca said. “This year, we scaled that to the capability within creative personalization in live sports and live entertainment.”
Paramount’s deal targets the cultural moment around binge viewing. “Whenever they drop a new series, they often drop them in threes. We captured that unique unit, personalized it, and then built around that binge experience and that shared cultural moment,” Pagliuca explained. NBCUniversal’s collaboration goes deeper into content metadata, pulling episode and scene-level data from its clean room to inform creative decisions.
Cross-publisher measurement finally arrives
Perhaps the most significant technical advancement involves Acxiom’s multi-party clean room infrastructure, which enables measurement across streaming publishers for the first time. This capability addresses a longstanding frustration for marketers who have struggled to evaluate campaign performance holistically across fragmented streaming inventory.
“This is new and game-changing because you didn’t have that capability before this data collaboration infrastructure that Acxiom has taken to market,” Pagliuca said. The system also passes creative IDs through the measurement framework, giving Omnicom Production and creative partners visibility into performance at a granular level.
“You can see creative ID by audience, by frequency band, by outcome that can all inform creative personalization,” she added.
You’re watching Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes Lions 2026, produced in collaboration with NYSE. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
You can find all of our coverage from Cannes Lions 2026 here.
