Pace Notes

On Nov. 30, Jess Ling becomes chief marketing officer of American Express, taking over from Elizabeth Rutledge, who retires in March after 37 years. The announcement credits Ling with bringing discipline to media spending. ADOTAT checks words like that for a living. Amex spent $6.3 billion on marketing in 2025, up roughly 75% since 2019, the year she arrived. Last quarter marketing rose another 11%, to $1.77 billion, in the same quarter Amex booked a $336 million restructuring charge to cut about 5% of its positions. That reads like the opposite of discipline.

Then the calls. On the fourth quarter 2025 call, the CFO said Amex had moved money away from cheaper cash back cards and toward premium ones. Fewer new cards. The share paying an annual fee rose eight points. By the third quarter of 2026, 76% of new accounts carried a fee, net card fees were up 17%, and U.S. consumer spending on the cards grew 9.4%. Ling had to sell the hardest piece: the Platinum fee going from $695 to $895, against more than $3,500 in advertised credits. A year later Amex reported 99% spend retention on the card. Discipline here means spending more on purpose and knowing what came back.

Her résumé explains the habit. By her count she spent about 17 years in B2B and revenue marketing, with stops at Microsoft, Atlas and AOL, then ran B2B marketing at Verizon Media, the team that pitched advertisers. Advertisers like Amex. She joined Amex in October 2019, ran prospect acquisition, the most measured job in a card company, and only moved to brand in 2023. She built OnBrand, the in-house agency, and still let Goodby Silverstein win the U.S. creative account in 2025. She took the work agencies never wanted and left them the work they do best.

For anyone selling media, data or ad tech, she has already published the rules. Every partner must bring reach the plan does not already have. Every placement is measured on its own. The data has to come back and test whether the original idea was even right. AI stays in the workflow and out of anything a customer sees. Her own line on brand spend: "It's not consideration and awareness at any cost or by any means." She sat on the selling side for years. She knows which slide is hiding the weak number.

Barb, the UK's industry body for TV measurement, released its third quarter Establishment Survey on Thursday, and PPC Land's Luís Rijo read it line by line. Netflix's ad plan reached 8.1 million UK homes, up from 7.3 million in one quarter. That is 44% of Netflix's 18.3 million homes, up from 41%. Netflix overall added only 300,000 homes, so most of the ad growth came from people trading down. By PPC Land's arithmetic, ad-free Netflix homes fell to about 10.2 million from 10.7 million. The ad plan also got pricier in September, £5.99 to £7.99, and the quarterly data cannot separate the price rise from anything else.

Now the unit. When Netflix set March 1, 2027 to launch its ad plan in nine more EMEA countries, it cited Barb data showing its UK ad plan reached more than 14 million viewers. That is people, from a viewing panel. The 8.1 million is homes, from a survey of who says they have access. Both can be true. Only one of them is the number in the sales deck. Barb itself warns that "caution should be applied" when its survey numbers are set against the services' own, and it publishes no margin of error.

The rest of the table is a lesson in defaults. Prime Video has 12.7 million ad-tier homes, 89% of its base, because Amazon switched everyone to ads in January 2024 unless they paid to leave. That is more than Netflix and Disney+ ad homes combined. Disney+ sits at 3.9 million ad homes, 43% of its base. HBO Max debuts at 3.1 million homes. Total streaming homes rose just 290,000, to 21.0 million, while homes with two or more services rose almost 600,000. The market is not growing much. It is stacking.

This is the territory ADOTAT's Unmeasured column keeps returning to: who is counted, in what unit, by whom. Nielsen crowned YouTube the top streamer while filing YouTube TV under cable. Fox said more games offset an 11% drop and Nielsen counted fewer. Netflix, which in October cut its 2026 ad revenue expectation to about $2.7 billion from $3 billion, now has two UK figures in two units. Before you sign, ask which one is on the invoice.