Netflix and Omnicom Media Group announced at the Cannes Lions Festival the first data collaboration alliance for advertising driven by artificial intelligence within the streaming platform. The agreement makes Omnicom the first official partner of this kind for Netflix and sets a new standard for advertising in streaming.
The central mechanism of the agreement is the fusion of two assets that neither party had separately: the audience intelligence of Acxiom, Omnicom's consumer data platform, with Netflix's proprietary viewing data and its AI engines and proprietary language models. The result is a system capable of generating multiple versions of the same advertisement, tailored to the specific content each user is watching at the moment the ad appears.
The practical implication is concrete. Instead of an advertiser airing the same spot for all Netflix users, the system produces distinct iterations of the same creative depending on the show or movie each person is consuming, adjusting the tone, context, and visual elements so that the ad is coherent with the narrative universe on screen. Each user can see a different version of the same advertising message, personalized in real-time.
The alliance also includes virtual product placement. Brands can generate digital twins of physical products, vehicles, phones, devices, and dynamically insert them within the streaming content, so that different viewers see different branded objects within the same scene. The attribution of results is completed with first-party data metrics from Netflix, allowing precise measurement of each creative variation and advertising format's performance.
The agreement starts immediately for Omnicom clients in the United States. Bimbo Bakeries USA is among the first brands to participate. Both companies confirmed plans for international expansion before the end of 2026.
For the next+ team, this alliance is likely the most relevant advertising movement to come out of Cannes 2026 because it simultaneously addresses three of the issues that have most limited the maturity of advertising in streaming: the lack of real personalization at scale, the absence of verifiable first-party data attribution, and the disconnection between the content context and the advertising message. That Netflix has chosen Omnicom as the first partner in this architecture is no accident: it is a sign of where the relationship between content platforms and large media groups is headed. Platforms that have sufficiently rich transactional or behavioral data to feed advertising personalization models will cease to be mere inventories where advertisers buy impressions, transforming into active infrastructure for building messages. For brands and agencies operating in Latin America, the confirmed international expansion before the end of 2026 makes this an immediate agenda topic, not a future one.