Paramount Global isn’t going back.
Despite the uncertain economy, the waiting game for the Skydance merger to close and ongoing linear TV disruption, ad sales chief John Halley stands firmly by his decision to withdraw from the main upfronts stage. “It’s not just about talent shows anymore,” Halley told Deadline in an interview. “It’s also about signal and transmission and connection, which kind of reshapes this notion of premium.”
This is the third straight cycle that Paramount has convened a series of smaller-scale client events rather than a single extravaganza in New York. The state of the company’s ad business, meanwhile, will enter the spotlight Thursday afternoon when Paramount reports first-quarter earnings. Last quarter, the company’s TV Media division posted a 4% year-over-year drop in ad revenue to $2.2 billion despite 2024 political spending, but direct-to-consumer ad sales climbed 9% to $574 million.
While the history is almost entirely prior to its 2019 merger of Viacom, CBS long threw the most lavish of all upfronts, centered around twin New York City landmarks Carnegie Hall and the Plaza Hotel. Since in-person events returned after Covid, rival media companies – and now Amazon, Netflix and YouTube – have hewed to the decades-old strategy of huge New York bashes. But Paramount, after a restructuring of its ad sales group, decided to shift gears after its 60 Minutes-themed 2022 edition.
Rival ad sales execs have taken note. “I wonder why they haven’t come back in,” one told Deadline in an interview. “They’re now the only ones without a full presence next week, it really stands out. Maybe they thought everyone would pull back, but we’re all here.”
Halley would argue that Paramount is very much present, only in a different fashion. The company this year has convened nine private dinners and events, mostly in New York but also in Chicago and L.A.
“There’s a lot of air in there,” Halley says of the spring schedule, which targets specific media agencies. “It’s a four-hour gathering and there’s a lot of conversation in the middle. It’s not bombastic. It allows us to actually listen to our customers. And, you know, I think, you know, it does impact what we hear in these rooms, it does impact our approach to the marketplace. It’s not just a big PR event and a bunch of linear, bombastic presentation.” By setting out on the trail well before mid-May, he adds, “we will have spent something like 40 hours with our most important clients in weeks where there’s very little competitive messaging.”
While the drumbeat of headlines continues about President Trump’s war with CBS News and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone’s dilemma with the Skydance deal, Halley points to Paramount’s strong hand in terms of content. Across broadcast and cable, the company had 13 of the 20 top-rated shows last season, he said, plus top-tier sports headlined by the NFL.
In terms of the mood of ad buyers, who have been buffeted by a series of cross-currents in the economy headed by Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, Halley doesn’t see any warning signs.
“Everyone is dealing in a landscape that is defined by like tariff fluctuations, concerns around consumer confidence, inflation, regulatory uncertainty,” Halley said. The uncertainty, he said, is “not going to impact all advertisers and all brands in the same way. This isn’t like Covid or the financial crisis.” Advertisers are “internalizing the implications of all this at different rates, right? And there’s scenario planning going on inside the brands. And I would say that they haven’t yet arrived at solid conclusions about what it all means.”
As brands look for safe harbor, he continued, “I think that we’re very well-positioned.”
The new approach to upfronts doesn’t just apply to event planning, Halley emphasized. It’s a rethinking of many well-worn assumptions.
“The old rules around path that purchase don’t really apply anymore,” he said. “If you think about the way that we engage in content, there are multiple modes of consumption happening all the time – streaming, scrolling, swiping, shopping, searching, et cetera. And in any one of those, right, you can they’re like all delivering awareness to transaction. … The shopping environment, you can buy something while watching it at an NFL game, right? I mean, it’s like, all of that has broken down. So we need to move away from these kind of siloed, upper-versus-lower-funnel paradigms. It’s something that we’ve been talking about for a couple years, the opportunity to redefine and re-express the power of premium television through these additional capabilities.”
