Netflix knows its ad business needs to move faster, and it’s bringing on a well-regarded adtech operator to pour on the accelerant.
The company said this week it’s hired Darshan Kantak, a Google, Snap, Meta, Microsoft, and Yahoo alum — he’s just missing Amazon on his résumé — as VP of its ads platform.
Former colleagues of Kantak told me he’s a detail-oriented leader accustomed to solving complex problems and willing to get his hands dirty.
The first major item on his to-do list will be getting Netflix’s adtech stack into gear. Last month, Netflix cut its annual advertising revenue forecast by $300 million to $2.7 billion, citing delays in rolling out ad products and partner integrations. (Netflix still expects its ad business to grow by 80% this year.)
Andrew Buckman, the CEO of the digital ad firm Publisher Collective, said Kantak, with whom he worked at Yahoo, has the chops to help figure out the snags.
Buckman recalled how Kantak came to his aid at Yahoo two decades ago. The company was rolling out a new search advertising platform, and Buckman was responsible for reconfiguring search-term pricing across all its European markets.
Buckman had missed one integration.
“I broke Finland,” he said.
Kantak, who was responsible for the entire global rollout, with Finland accounting for a tiny slice of overall revenue, sat next to Buckman’s computer for two hours as they pored over the data together to fix the problem.
“I always had the feeling that he was the biggest brain in the room but would never actually admit it,” Buckman said. “He was always open to working through different problems, rolling his sleeves up, and figuring out the right solution with you as you go along.”
At Meta, former colleague Graham Mudd, who is now an SVP of product at Mozilla, said Kantak was instrumental in building some of the products that helped shift Facebook toward a data-driven performance advertising business, having previously mostly focused on brand advertising. That should bode well for Netflix as it seeks to diversify its advertising customer base, Mudd said.
“He knows the playbook,” Mudd said. “If you want someone who knows exactly what to do and how to motivate people to get there and the experience to know, ‘if we do X, Y will happen,’ he’s a great person for that.”
In a statement, Kantak said he was drawn to Netflix for the chance to use technology to ensure ads feel “relevant and welcome for members, and technical tools that make advertising even more innovative and effective.”
As for Kantak’s specific tasks ahead, Netflix said on its latest earnings call that its advertising priorities include rolling out new ad formats and increasing the availability of measurement and reporting tools. And next year, it plans to expand its ad-supported tier to 15 new countries.
Iván Markman, Yahoo’s former chief business officer, said he recalled Kantak as leading on “gnarly problems requiring a lot of brainpower,” such as Yahoo’s growing marketplaces business and the development of early programmatic advertising products after its acquisition of the Right Media exchange in 2007.
“When I think about CTV, premium video, and the marketplace more broadly, all of these players still have a lot of cloth to cut in terms of how you build out both the experience and the marketplace in a thoughtful way, globally,” Markman said of Netflix’s ad opportunity. “Darshan’s been there and done that.”
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