Netflix's Ken Ross
Photo: Courtesy of Ken Ross
All this month we're bringing you Q&As with our 2007 Event Strategists of the Year. Here's the third.
Events have proven to be an effective weapon in Netflix’s fight against the entertainment giant Blockbuster. They add a real-life component to an online-only service, giving members and non-members alike an opportunity to experience the brand. This year, Ken Ross, 54, Netflix vice president of corporate communications, and his five-person team launched an offensive with its summer concert series entitled “Netflix Live! On Location,” which paired movie classics with musical performances by the films’ featured stars—in the cities where the movies were filmed. (Think Dennis Quaid performing in New Orleans, followed by a screening of The Big Easy.) The event achieved two of Ross’s strategic objectives: bringing Los Gatos, California-based Netflix to a mass audience, and generating national buzz.
What was the evolution of Live! On Location?
In 2006, we launched Netflix Rolling Roadshow, a series of outdoor screenings in locations made famous by the movies that we were screening. For example, we screened Jaws on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard and Field of Dreams on the baseball field in Iowa where the movie was filmed. We were lucky enough to persuade Kevin Costner to bring his band to Dyersville and do a concert before the screening. We had 6,000 people there, and the Iowa Highway Patrol had to close the roads. It was the first time in the 18 years since Kevin made the movie that he was back there. It was the perfect blend of brand, star, and consumer experience.
In the process of working with Kevin, we discovered that there are a number of celebrities who are pursuing a musical avocation as well. So this year we decided to build a program around that. And we decided on fewer events. As wonderful as Rolling Roadshow was, it wasn’t lost on us that the Field of Dreams event swamped all of the other events combined from a news standpoint, and that’s an essential component of our strategy. So we had three events this year, versus 10 last year.What does Netflix aim to accomplish with its events?
At a high level, our events are intended to accomplish two things: bring the Netflix experience to a mass audience in a way that’s truly engaging, and use the news value built into events to generate visibility and buzz on a national media stage. All great consumer brands would tell you that awareness and buzz is a critical objective, but in our case it’s a bit different. We’re leading a major behavioral change. For decades—forever—renting a movie meant going to local video stores, so these events are a way for us to create national news and tell that story in the process. People who know Netflix think everyone in the world knows who we are. That is not the case. We still face an awareness gap versus our principal competitor, Blockbuster, which has pretty much ubiquitous awareness. So we have to be a little bit more creative and have to be a little more ingenious, a little more aggressive. That’s the challenge of it, and that’s the fun of it. These events and the news platform they create are a way for us to educate an increasingly mainstream audience that we’re targeting. We’ve blown through the early adopters, and we’re very much focused on the main street—the soccer moms and Nascar dads.
How do you ensure that your event strategy is plugged into the overall goals and objectives of the company?
By understanding who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish and then making certain that everything we do, every ounce of energy we expend, every dollar we spend, has a chance of meaningfully moving that agenda. It’s just that simple. For us, I think a lot about how we’re trying to position this brand. Our core positioning is movie enjoyment made easy, so we’re relentlessly diagnosing ideas against that positioning. One of the things I talk to management about all the time is, unless you’re a member, you don’t have a great opportunity to feel the magic of Netflix. So we’re looking for our programs to give nonmembers that opportunity. One of the things we loved about Live! On Location was, in some ways, it’s the very embodiment of the brand’s positioning. This is great, free entertainment in your backyard.
How do you keep your team focused on the company’s overall objectives?
For me, it starts in how I approach hiring, and there’s a certain profile I’ve always looked for as a hiring manager for the last 25 years: what I describe as a high-low player. The people I want on my team have the ability to think strategically at 30,000 feet, have a core understanding of the business and its objectives, and are also able to be nimble at street level.
That’s a hard skill to detect in someone.
Hiring is a combination of exploration and gut. I’m looking for practical skills because we’re marketers and communicators, and you have to possess certain core skills to do that well. Articulating an idea in either the spoken or written word, for example, is very important to us. I’m also looking for intellectual curiosity, so a good deal of the conversation will have nothing to do with PR or marketing and have a lot to do with things seemingly unrelated that give me an opportunity to test intellectual acumen. People with intellectual curiosity are the kinds of people who are most likely going to challenge the norm. So it’s skill, it’s intellectual curiosity, and the third piece of the mix is an absolutely relentless focus on results. At the end of day, it’s about delivering what we committed to the organization. I think a lot of people, particularly in the PR business, confuse activity with results. There needs to be activity to achieve results, but I don’t want to hear that we issued a press release; that means nothing to me. I want to hear what results we achieved against the objectives we identified.
How do you measure results?
For us, on a project like Live! On Location, we measure return on investment against two criteria: Are we creating an equity-enhancing experience, from a brand standpoint, that thousands of people will have an opportunity to engage in? And are we driving national news that creates not only awareness for the brand, but buzz?
Using those criteria, what were the results of Live! On Location?
Based on the thousands of people who came out to attend the shows and the national news we were able to drive, I would deem these events highly successful. The news media outlets were in the dozens. Maria Menounos, a special correspondent for Access Hollywood and a West Coast contributor for the Today show, served as host of the tour. She had four segments on Access, which was a big strategic win for us.
Did you have to convince your managers that events are a big part of pursing this vision?
One of the things I love most about this company is that it believes in hiring experts and trusting them to do what they do well. What really attracted me to the opportunity was the belief that I was going to be able to come in here and establish and articulate my vision and would be given the maneuvering room to execute it. And that’s what’s happened.
I’m assuming the people who work for Netflix are a different breed from the consumers you’re targeting in the heartland. How do you keep your employees focused on that demographic?
I think a lot of companies suffer from talking more to themselves than to their customers. I have always wanted to make sure that I, personally, and my team never lost sight of the fact that the opportunity is in the marketplace, not in a conference room. So it’s relentlessly reminding ourselves that we need to be looking outside of the windows and not inside these four walls.
MORE FROM KEN ROSS
How He Keeps Up With Industry Trends: “Stacks of newspapers and magazines taken to the gym on weekends—plus a large network of colleagues who stay in close touch and are doing interesting things in the industry.”
What’s Not in His Job Description: “Always asking, ‘What if?’ and ‘What next?’”
What He’s Reading: “I started, put down, and hope soon to return to Wallace Stegner’s classic Angle of Repose.”
Biggest Accomplishment of 2007: “Many years you’re lucky to get to 50 percent of what you set out to do because circumstances intervene: issues, crises, shifting market conditions, funding. We had an ambitious corporate communications agenda this year—with Netflix Live! On Location a key piece—and for the most part we’ve stayed true to course.”
Goal for 2008: “Doing our part to insure the Netflix brand remains highly relevant and highly admired in the consumer marketplace—especially as that marketplace continues to evolve.”
How He Sees Events Changing: “I don’t know how they’re changing, but I can say that unless they are a fully integrated component of the total marketing effort and unless they are helping bring a common brand vision to life, they aren’t worth two cents.”
How His Job Is Changing: “The role of communications overall—with events a part of it—has changed significantly during the course of my career, which covers 25 years. That’s attributable to the bombardment of messages we as consumers feel everywhere we turn, the increasingly important strategic need to get communications right, and the access and influence that come with that. It’s always been about enhancing and defending our company’s and our brand’s reputations, but today’s marketplace is noisier and more cluttered than ever, and PR programs had better have a sharp edge, better be highly compelling, if they’re to cut through.”
Favorite New Technology: “I’m still trying to master typing quickly and at least somewhat accurately on my Blackberry.”
How He Measures ROI: “Sure, we look closely at the reach of the earned media we generate, but I’ve always been a big believer in the ‘mother-in-law’ test. If your mother-in-law calls up and says, ‘Hey, I saw you guys on TV in Buffalo,’ it’s a pretty good indication you’ve achieved the consumer penetration you were after.”
Events have proven to be an effective weapon in Netflix’s fight against the entertainment giant Blockbuster. They add a real-life component to an online-only service, giving members and non-members alike an opportunity to experience the brand. This year, Ken Ross, 54, Netflix vice president of corporate communications, and his five-person team launched an offensive with its summer concert series entitled “Netflix Live! On Location,” which paired movie classics with musical performances by the films’ featured stars—in the cities where the movies were filmed. (Think Dennis Quaid performing in New Orleans, followed by a screening of The Big Easy.) The event achieved two of Ross’s strategic objectives: bringing Los Gatos, California-based Netflix to a mass audience, and generating national buzz.
What was the evolution of Live! On Location?
In 2006, we launched Netflix Rolling Roadshow, a series of outdoor screenings in locations made famous by the movies that we were screening. For example, we screened Jaws on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard and Field of Dreams on the baseball field in Iowa where the movie was filmed. We were lucky enough to persuade Kevin Costner to bring his band to Dyersville and do a concert before the screening. We had 6,000 people there, and the Iowa Highway Patrol had to close the roads. It was the first time in the 18 years since Kevin made the movie that he was back there. It was the perfect blend of brand, star, and consumer experience.
In the process of working with Kevin, we discovered that there are a number of celebrities who are pursuing a musical avocation as well. So this year we decided to build a program around that. And we decided on fewer events. As wonderful as Rolling Roadshow was, it wasn’t lost on us that the Field of Dreams event swamped all of the other events combined from a news standpoint, and that’s an essential component of our strategy. So we had three events this year, versus 10 last year.What does Netflix aim to accomplish with its events?
At a high level, our events are intended to accomplish two things: bring the Netflix experience to a mass audience in a way that’s truly engaging, and use the news value built into events to generate visibility and buzz on a national media stage. All great consumer brands would tell you that awareness and buzz is a critical objective, but in our case it’s a bit different. We’re leading a major behavioral change. For decades—forever—renting a movie meant going to local video stores, so these events are a way for us to create national news and tell that story in the process. People who know Netflix think everyone in the world knows who we are. That is not the case. We still face an awareness gap versus our principal competitor, Blockbuster, which has pretty much ubiquitous awareness. So we have to be a little bit more creative and have to be a little more ingenious, a little more aggressive. That’s the challenge of it, and that’s the fun of it. These events and the news platform they create are a way for us to educate an increasingly mainstream audience that we’re targeting. We’ve blown through the early adopters, and we’re very much focused on the main street—the soccer moms and Nascar dads.
How do you ensure that your event strategy is plugged into the overall goals and objectives of the company?
By understanding who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish and then making certain that everything we do, every ounce of energy we expend, every dollar we spend, has a chance of meaningfully moving that agenda. It’s just that simple. For us, I think a lot about how we’re trying to position this brand. Our core positioning is movie enjoyment made easy, so we’re relentlessly diagnosing ideas against that positioning. One of the things I talk to management about all the time is, unless you’re a member, you don’t have a great opportunity to feel the magic of Netflix. So we’re looking for our programs to give nonmembers that opportunity. One of the things we loved about Live! On Location was, in some ways, it’s the very embodiment of the brand’s positioning. This is great, free entertainment in your backyard.
How do you keep your team focused on the company’s overall objectives?
For me, it starts in how I approach hiring, and there’s a certain profile I’ve always looked for as a hiring manager for the last 25 years: what I describe as a high-low player. The people I want on my team have the ability to think strategically at 30,000 feet, have a core understanding of the business and its objectives, and are also able to be nimble at street level.
That’s a hard skill to detect in someone.
Hiring is a combination of exploration and gut. I’m looking for practical skills because we’re marketers and communicators, and you have to possess certain core skills to do that well. Articulating an idea in either the spoken or written word, for example, is very important to us. I’m also looking for intellectual curiosity, so a good deal of the conversation will have nothing to do with PR or marketing and have a lot to do with things seemingly unrelated that give me an opportunity to test intellectual acumen. People with intellectual curiosity are the kinds of people who are most likely going to challenge the norm. So it’s skill, it’s intellectual curiosity, and the third piece of the mix is an absolutely relentless focus on results. At the end of day, it’s about delivering what we committed to the organization. I think a lot of people, particularly in the PR business, confuse activity with results. There needs to be activity to achieve results, but I don’t want to hear that we issued a press release; that means nothing to me. I want to hear what results we achieved against the objectives we identified.
How do you measure results?
For us, on a project like Live! On Location, we measure return on investment against two criteria: Are we creating an equity-enhancing experience, from a brand standpoint, that thousands of people will have an opportunity to engage in? And are we driving national news that creates not only awareness for the brand, but buzz?
Using those criteria, what were the results of Live! On Location?
Based on the thousands of people who came out to attend the shows and the national news we were able to drive, I would deem these events highly successful. The news media outlets were in the dozens. Maria Menounos, a special correspondent for Access Hollywood and a West Coast contributor for the Today show, served as host of the tour. She had four segments on Access, which was a big strategic win for us.
Did you have to convince your managers that events are a big part of pursing this vision?
One of the things I love most about this company is that it believes in hiring experts and trusting them to do what they do well. What really attracted me to the opportunity was the belief that I was going to be able to come in here and establish and articulate my vision and would be given the maneuvering room to execute it. And that’s what’s happened.
I’m assuming the people who work for Netflix are a different breed from the consumers you’re targeting in the heartland. How do you keep your employees focused on that demographic?
I think a lot of companies suffer from talking more to themselves than to their customers. I have always wanted to make sure that I, personally, and my team never lost sight of the fact that the opportunity is in the marketplace, not in a conference room. So it’s relentlessly reminding ourselves that we need to be looking outside of the windows and not inside these four walls.
MORE FROM KEN ROSS
How He Keeps Up With Industry Trends: “Stacks of newspapers and magazines taken to the gym on weekends—plus a large network of colleagues who stay in close touch and are doing interesting things in the industry.”
What’s Not in His Job Description: “Always asking, ‘What if?’ and ‘What next?’”
What He’s Reading: “I started, put down, and hope soon to return to Wallace Stegner’s classic Angle of Repose.”
Biggest Accomplishment of 2007: “Many years you’re lucky to get to 50 percent of what you set out to do because circumstances intervene: issues, crises, shifting market conditions, funding. We had an ambitious corporate communications agenda this year—with Netflix Live! On Location a key piece—and for the most part we’ve stayed true to course.”
Goal for 2008: “Doing our part to insure the Netflix brand remains highly relevant and highly admired in the consumer marketplace—especially as that marketplace continues to evolve.”
How He Sees Events Changing: “I don’t know how they’re changing, but I can say that unless they are a fully integrated component of the total marketing effort and unless they are helping bring a common brand vision to life, they aren’t worth two cents.”
How His Job Is Changing: “The role of communications overall—with events a part of it—has changed significantly during the course of my career, which covers 25 years. That’s attributable to the bombardment of messages we as consumers feel everywhere we turn, the increasingly important strategic need to get communications right, and the access and influence that come with that. It’s always been about enhancing and defending our company’s and our brand’s reputations, but today’s marketplace is noisier and more cluttered than ever, and PR programs had better have a sharp edge, better be highly compelling, if they’re to cut through.”
Favorite New Technology: “I’m still trying to master typing quickly and at least somewhat accurately on my Blackberry.”
How He Measures ROI: “Sure, we look closely at the reach of the earned media we generate, but I’ve always been a big believer in the ‘mother-in-law’ test. If your mother-in-law calls up and says, ‘Hey, I saw you guys on TV in Buffalo,’ it’s a pretty good indication you’ve achieved the consumer penetration you were after.”
