At karaoke on Tuesday, in the sticky-floored bar in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby, a guy ahead of me put in a song, got called up, and then announced from the stage that he does not actually sing. He sang. But he needed us to know first that this was not who he was.
I thought about that man all week, because Netflix spent this month doing the same thing at a scale of thirty billion dollars.
Two weeks ago Netflix named Microsoft its technology and sales partner for an ad-supported tier. This follows a second consecutive quarter of subscriber losses. And it follows a decade of Netflix defining itself, loudly, as the company that would never show you a commercial. No ads was not a pricing choice over there. It was the identity.
The strategy is defensible. The ad tier will probably work. Hulu has run one for years, and the money in connected television is real. My problem is not the business decision.
My problem is that Netflix is trying to introduce commercials as a feature, and a brand cannot un-say a decade of a promise by reframing the reversal as generosity.
Watch the language over the next few months. It will be about choice. It will be about accessibility, more price points, meeting members where they are. Every one of those sentences is true. Not one of them is what a customer is going to feel when an ad break lands in the middle of an episode on a service they specifically chose because it did not do that.
Here is the part that gets lost in these announcements. The audience does not experience a strategic pivot as a strategic pivot. They experience it as the discovery that something they were told was a principle turned out to be a feature, and features get removed when the quarter goes sideways.
The move that would have worked is the one almost nobody makes: say the old thing out loud and retire it. We said never. The economics changed and we were wrong about never. Here is the cheaper plan, here is what it costs you in interruptions, here is the plan that still has none. That version costs a week of bad headlines. The generosity version costs trust in a slow leak nobody puts on a dashboard.
Netflix taught an entire generation what television without commercials feels like. That was genuinely their gift to the culture, and it is a strange thing to now sell back in pieces.
They experience it as the discovery that something they were told was a principle turned out to be a feature, and features get removed when the quarter goes sideways.
The guy at karaoke, for the record, should have skipped the disclaimer. Nobody in that room needed it. We had already decided to be on his side.