Netflix wants to mature its ad business from infancy to “Adolescence,” and the company just made a key international hire to help boost sales.
The streamer recently hired Ed Couchman to lead its UK advertising sales team, Netflix confirmed to Business Insider.
Couchman is set to join Netflix later this year from Spotify, where he had been head of advertising sales for the UK and Northern Europe since 2023. He is a familiar face on the UK advertising scene, with experience in both traditional and digital media. Before joining Spotify in 2023, Couchman previously held senior UK-based ad sales roles at Snap, Meta, and the British broadcaster Channel 4.
Spotify declined to comment.
Couchman will report to Damien Bernet, Netflix’s VP of EMEA advertising, and will replace Warren Dias, whose exit from Netflix was announced in May. Dias had been in the role for two years.
Netflix said during its second-quarter earnings this month that it was on track to “roughly double” its ad revenue in 2025, having also doubled its annual ad revenue last year. Execs on the earnings call said they were encouraged by the rollout of its in-house adtech stack in all the markets in which it sells ads, and by advertiser interest in live events. Those include comedy specials, wrestling, and boxing events. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said on the call that interactive ad formats and generative AI would also help open up new areas of ad growth.
Netflix doesn’t break out its advertising revenue in its financials. The ads plan initially launched in several markets worldwide, including the UK, in November 2022. The streamer said in June its ad-supported tier had reached 94 million monthly active users.
Netflix has already made some headway in the UK ad market. June data from Barb, which measures TV ratings, found Netflix had the biggest share of 16- to 34-year-old viewers — a key demographic for advertisers — among all the commercial video-on-demand services in the country.
Separate data from the UK communications regulator Ofcom found that Netflix was the most popular video-on-demand service in the UK in 2024, with viewers watching for an average of 22 minutes per day.
Spotify’s advertising unit is undergoing challenges aside from Couchman’s departure. The music streaming service recently parted ways with its ad sales chief, Lee Brown, who is joining DoorDash as its chief revenue officer. Spotify said this week that its ad business hadn’t met the company’s growth expectations and that it was the right time for a leadership change.
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