Paramount Global won’t be holding up at New York’s Carnegie Hall during the season “in advance” of TV, indicating some of the many changes taking place in the ways traditional media companies talk to Madison Avenue about matching commercials with content.
“will host a series of intimate, high-impact gatherings in April for each of our key agency partners and their clients in place of our traditional Carnegie Hall presence,” said John Haley, Paramount, owner of CBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount+. The company’s new head of advertising sales in the US, in a statement. “We believe that this expanded format will prove to be more effective in facilitating our upcoming pre-existing discussions.”
The former CBS Corp., now part of Paramount, has used Carnegie Wednesdays for years, relying on guests like The Who and Stephen Colbert to help the company make an impression with advertisers.
Television networks have put on dazzling advance shows for advertisers for a week every May for decades, but as technology forces drastic shifts in the advertising space, heated debate about the feasibility of this present has intensified. Advertisers are funneling more of their money into digital and streaming opportunities, which are often governed by audience-profiling algorithms and software, reducing the need for huge annual bargaining during which the majority of television’s commercial inventory is typically sold.
However, Paramount is taking a risk. Rival NBCUniversal has already indicated that it intends to conduct prequels as usual with a presentation on May 15, 2023 at Radio City Music Hall in New York. The company will hold a separate event for its Spanish-language media outlet Telemundo on the same day. Fox declined to comment on its prequel plans for 2023. Representatives for Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery could not be reached for an immediate response.
Television companies that give up on presentations in advance often find that a competitor is grateful to usurp the space on the calendar. in 2008, NBCUniversal stepped back from the usual Radio City scene In favor of an “experiment” she walks into her New York headquarters. Fox, which would normally close for a week of shows premiered on Thursdays, moved to Mondays with a more traditional show — and it’s stayed there ever since. Many of the new media companies that have made it a greater goal to attract advertisers can also try to get involved. For example, Netflix is accelerating ad sales efforts for a new tier of its streaming service that includes commercials, and YouTube is another public Google site that held a presentation during a week of pre-meetings that usually centered on television.
Noting that “new realities require new approaches”, Haley of Paramount suggested that “as investment in media becomes more complex, the event must evolve to meet this moment”.
Haley said the one-on-one meetings are “aimed to encourage conversation with our most trusted partners – to hear directly from the agencies and advertisers we serve who are the bedrock of our business.” He added that early timing “will increase the share of the voice, in an environment more conducive to deeper engagement.”
Networks are facing a storm of challenges. Many large advertisers are considering whether to cut back on advertising expenditures due to fears of a looming recession and after stumbles in the stock market. But the networks are also starting to sell in different ways that are less associated with serving a single ad to millions of viewers at 9 p.m. on Thursdays. These days, networks must collect thousands of impressions across a wide variety of display windows and convince advertisers that such access is worth a premium.
Paramount is a big player in the field of impressions. It offers dozens of youth delinquency programs across its children’s media empire Nickeldoeon, the popular “Yellowstone” series on Paramount Network and Paramount +. and a host of popular CBS sports, news and entertainment programming. But it also has plenty of junk cargo to sell, particularly inventory on cable networks like MTV and Comedy Central that’s largely stocked with repeats — an experience that could easily be replicated on the so-called “FAST” channel. Haley is about to find out if private meetings are a better way to talk about advertiser opportunities.
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