{"id":573610,"date":"2023-05-08T17:52:11","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T14:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/paramount-ad-sales-chief-skipping-upfronts-was-the-right-decision-this-year\/"},"modified":"2023-05-08T17:52:11","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T14:52:11","slug":"paramount-ad-sales-chief-skipping-upfronts-was-the-right-decision-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/paramount-ad-sales-chief-skipping-upfronts-was-the-right-decision-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"#Paramount Ad Sales Chief: Skipping Upfronts Was \u201cThe Right Decision\u201d This Year"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n Paramount may have chosen the right year to sit out the annual upfront presentations.<\/p>\n

\n In December, the owner of CBS and Paramount+ announced that it would forgo its annual presentation at Carnegie Hall in favor of smaller meetings in the offices of buyers and agencies. While other media<\/a> companies are just beginning their upfront discussions (and figuring out how the presentations will work with the ongoing writers strike) John Halley says his team\u2019s meetings with clients are mostly done.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cOur objective here is to make the complex simple,\u201d Halley tells The Hollywood Reporter<\/em> in an interview.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThere\u2019s so much chaos in the marketplace and all that comes down to presentation, it\u2019s like fragmentation of everything, our business is experiencing change on every axis,\u201d Halley adds. \u201cYes, content is king, but simplicity is also very important. They have to share the throne.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n The decision to abandon the glitz and glamour of an upfront presentation \u201cturned out, without question, to be the right decision,\u201d Halley says, adding that this year may in fact be a turning point for the tradition, which sees brands and buyrs converge in New York City in May, running from one presentation to the next (the actual upfront negotiations usually take place in the weeks and months after that).<\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe\u2019re gonna do a post mortem on it, but I can tell you that we are not going back to the old way to do it,\u201d Halley says. \u201cWhen you actually query agencies about what they think about the traditional upfront week, it turns out, they don\u2019t like it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n The smaller, more intimate discussions, well ahead of the rest of the upfront talks, have already proven their worth, he adds.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think for us, it has provided much more engagement time with our most important clients and agency partners,\u201d Halley says. \u201cWe\u2019re doing it in a period where others aren\u2019t doing anything, and so we have we have their full attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n Since taking over Paramount\u2019s ad business in September, Halley has been tasked with bringing together disparate teams and making the company\u2019s advertising infrastructure tech-forward.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cBuyers jobs become incredibly difficult, the onus is on us to help simplify that,\u201d Halley says. \u201cAnd we do that through aggregation of large audiences. And we also do that through a lot of platform mediation. We do that through optimization. We do that through segmentation. We do that through a lot of integration. And our positioning is really that we want to be most skilled, most efficient, and the most flexible in the marketplace to help alleviate the natural pressures that fragmentation is bringing our business. And, you know, we\u2019re going to lean into the sophistication available, but we\u2019re going to do it based on the advertisers\u2019 and the agencies\u2019 preference around data and infrastructure, not ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n And while Paramount won\u2019t have to grapp<\/a>le with a picket line outside of Carnegie Hall this year (a problem its competitors will likely need to navigate), the company is still figuring out what impact the strike will have on its business.<\/p>\n

\n \u201cYou prepare for the worst and hope for the best,\u201d Halley says. There\u2019s a lot of uncertainty around how long it\u2019s going to be, right? \u2026 We\u2019re doing all the scenario planning that we can.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n