Paramount Ad Sales Chief: Skipping Upfronts Week Was “The Right Decision” This Year

Paramount may have chosen the right year to sit out the annual upfront presentations.

In December, the owner of CBS and Paramount+ announced that it would forgo its annual presentation at Carnegie Hall in favor of smaller events with buyers and agencies. While other media 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’s meetings with clients are mostly done.

“Our objective here is to make the complex simple,” Halley tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.

“There’s so much chaos in the marketplace and all that comes down to presentation, it’s like fragmentation of everything, our business is experiencing change on every axis,” Halley adds. “Yes, content is king, but simplicity is also very important. They have to share the throne.”

The decision to abandon the glitz and glamour of an upfront week presentation “turned out, without question, to be the right decision,” Halley says, adding that this year may in fact be a turning point for the tradition, which sees brands and buyers 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).

“We’re 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,” Halley says. “When you actually query agencies about what they think about the traditional upfront week, it turns out, they don’t like it.”

The smaller, more intimate events, well ahead of the rest of the upfront talks, have already proven their worth, he adds.

“I think for us, it has provided much more engagement time with our most important clients and agency partners,” Halley says. “We’re doing it in a period where others aren’t doing anything, and so we have we have their full attention.”

Since taking over Paramount’s ad business in September, Halley has been tasked with bringing together disparate teams and making the company’s advertising infrastructure tech-forward.

“Buyers jobs become incredibly difficult, the onus is on us to help simplify that,” Halley says. “And 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’re going to lean into the sophistication available, but we’re going to do it based on the advertisers’ and the agencies’ preference around data and infrastructure, not ours.”

And while Paramount won’t have to grapple 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.

“You prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” Halley says. There’s a lot of uncertainty around how long it’s going to be, right? … We’re doing all the scenario planning that we can.”