Netflix will develop increasingly targeted and tailor-made advertising formats to win over marketing bosses as it seeks to boost revenues in its recently launched advertising supported service.

The US streaming service held talks with global advertising executives about new plans at this year’s Cannes Lions festival in the south of France after launching the ad-supported service last year.

Advertising executives said innovations could include “episodic” campaigns that would see a series of different but related sequential ads to consumers, which would avoid the common complaint of consumers of being shown the same ad multiple times when watching a series. These could be shown during related shows — for example, light entertainment — but not others.

Netflix was a prominent presence at the vast festival of advertising in its first year at the event, hosting a party in a branded hotel on the seafront and an event with ex-footballer David Beckham. 

Netflix co-chief executive Greg Peters and Jeremi Gorman, president of worldwide advertising at Netflix, spent the week in France courting advertising bosses and brands, according to multiple advertising executives.

They said that their counterparts at Netflix outlined how the US media giant would introduce sophisticated ways for brands to advertise as part of a long-term strategy to redefine how streamers can use their platforms for commercial purposes. This includes allowing brands to more directly target advertising to consumers in ways not possible on linear TV channels.

One Hollywood marketing executive said that the partnership to use Microsoft’s technology was also likely to come to an end next year, which would allow Netflix greater ability to innovate. 

“They’re building [their own technology] in the background. Once they have their own they’ll do free standing. Microsoft is the interim ad server, but that’ll change when they build their own,” he said. “

The plan for Netflix was just to get to market quickly last year. This is not the final way they’re going to do it. They are going to be very creative. There’s going to be a better, a different experience.”

One advertising boss said Netflix would be able to use its data on customers to create more bespoke marketing, albeit in ways still safeguarding customer data protections.

“They’ll know what you’ve seen,” he said. “So the old days of making episodic work may be back because before you could never guarantee what people have seen already. Now you can write 15 episodes of an advert and guarantee that the viewer will see them in the right order. So that’s really interesting.”

Another advertising chief said Netflix now made more money per user on its advertising plans than in the standard tier. He said brands had been positive on the idea of using Netflix to market their products, although he added that the size of the audience was still small.

“Streaming services thought it would devalue their offer. But actually, it’s massively expanded the reach. Brands are extremely keen to be associated with the Netflix content and now they’re starting to think about much more innovation around the format, much more strategic partnerships.”

Another advertising executive said: “What level of targeting that they start to apply could get really, really interesting. We were keen for some of our brands to use it so that we could see what was coming [but] we can’t correlate exposure to Netflix to sales — it’s just too small. But you can get learning about who saw your ads.”

Netflix is also seeking to build out its gaming business to include advertising, noted another ad executive. Others added that they expected Apple to follow Netflix and introduce advertising alongside its shows and products. Netflix and Microsoft declined to comment.