Media buyers have been calling for a converged advertising solution for years, and are naturally delighted that Paramount Australia is finally able to deliver it. This positions the globally-owned local TV company in a unique position, even though the market is unsure about ‘blended CPMs’ and whether flexibility in buying strategies will be backed in.
Better late than never is the overriding sentiment of media buyers in the room.
A year ago Paramount promised that it would create a single interface that would allow brands to buy audiences across the Paramount ecosystem, which includes its terrestrial linear TV business Channel 10, its BVOD 10 Play, the ad-supported SVOD Paramount+ and its 60+ FAST channels, Pluto.
A year later and that promise finally has a roll-out date, January 2025.
Media buyers who attended Paramounts 2025 Upfront events in Sydney yesterday breathed a collective sigh of relief. Such promises of a single ecosystem buys are not new, but delivering them would be an Australia-first, and at time when the Australia TV market is being battered by sharp declines in advertising in ad spend and global raiders like Netflix and Amazon Prime setting up shop to carve out their own slices of the advertising pie.
The leader of one of the largest media buying groups in Australia, GroupM, was left impressed by Paramount Connect, the upfront event and where the company is positioned.
“I think they’ve got an awesome positioning,” GroupM ANZ CEO Aimee Buchanan told B&T. “They understand streaming, they understand content. They’ve got the global backing to give them the infrastructure, the technology, and the titles that are required.
“But they’re embedded here. They’re not offshoring their sales team. They know their audiences, their clients, and they know the brands that they need to work with. I feel really good about them.”
Buchanan said that Paramount Connect is “ultimately what advertisers want” in terms of providing a single view of an audience that will allow them to target and reach consumers more effectively and efficiently.
Paramount’s pivotal moment
Spark Foundry’s chief investment officer Lucie Jansen said the introduction of Paramount Connect felt like a pivotal moment in Paramount Global’s ownership of the Network 10 assets.
She said that while Paramount has provided a solid slate of content and commercial backing, deploying its US technology (called EYEQ) to develop Paramount Connect could be a game changer for its Australian arm.
“What I really liked, particularly in terms of Paramount, is they’ve now got some real support from the US. Since they became part of Paramount, we haven’t seen as much sort of benefits as I think we would have liked to have seen,”
“Now they’ve got tried and tested technology, and a person in Lee Sears (Paramount’s international ad sales president), who is actually making that connection and making sure the benefits that we’ve seen in other countries are being brought forward.”
Jansen believes that Paramount Connect, which in essence allows brands to buy audiences across an ecosystem that has 16.3 million monthly viewers, is critical because it de-duplicates reach and drives up effectiveness.
“Because of the economic situation, where budgets are really being squeezed, and marketers, quite rightly, need to prove effectiveness, the timing is really good and vitally important,” she said.
Jansen is unsure if Paramount Connect can help the business claw back some of the leakage of advertising budgets that has left linear TV, but said it places Paramount in a much stronger position.
Blending premium & long tail
Avenue C co-founder and managing partner Will Chapman said it was “really exciting” that a TV and video business was finally delivering on the promise of a converged advertising trading solution that allowed brands to buy audiences across various platforms.
“The fact that we’re going to have all of this scale through Paramount Connect, which includes 10 Play, Paramount+, Pluto’s FAST channels and eventually Channel 10 is a really compelling proposition. We’re in the business of maximising reach on behalf of brands, so the ability to remove duplication, control fragmentation and frequency is really exciting,” he said.
The challenge, argues Chapman, is working out the pricing model and how a “blended CPM” would work in practice.
“You have this really premium inventory on Paramount+ and 10 Play and then you have the inventory on Pluto, which you might describe as the long-tail of the Paramount ecosystem. Naturally, we will not want to be paying the same amount for these different formats.
“If all of the formats were premium with really low ad loads, really high lean in, high attention environments, it would be absolutely awesome. The challenge is the Pluto channel.
“Once we get under the hood of the technology, we need to understand the cost benefit, and the trade off in being in some of these lower quality environments.”
Flexibility the key
Chapman also said that he hopes there will be flexibility in the way brands can access audiences and that Paramount Connect doesn’t impair the ability of brands to trade on single platforms rather than a bended approach.
“Not many brands in Australia have the ability to maximise one plus reach all year round,” he said.
“And from a blended CPM standpoint, there are a lot of clients willing to pay significantly higher CPMs to get more inventory that is higher quality and delivers stronger business outcomes. If that is taken away, and we are pushed into this new way of trading, it is counterintuitive.
“We want to make sure businesses who have tried and tested buying strategies within our total television environment are not held back.”
What else caught the eye?
All buyers speaking to B&T said rebranding 10 Play to ‘10’ was a wise move and follows a trend that is happening in the UK where Channel 4 and Channel 5 have rebranded their BVODs in line with their linear TV brand.
Jansen liked the addition of new shoppable ad formats and Paramount providing robust research about the effectiveness of TV program sponsorships.
She also enjoyed the entertainment and tone of the event, in particular Julia Morris.
Morris warned attendees the presentation would be laden with acronyms like SVOD, AVOD, BVOD and a ‘Prosser Rod’, “We’ve got all of the Rods in one location”.
Robert Irwin, Tara Rushton, Beau Ryan, Angela Bishop, Grant Denyer, Melissa Leong, Matt Burke, Sam Pang, Sandra Sully and Todd Sampson were among the on air talent in the room.
Comedy is what Paramount prides itself upon, and this was certainly reflected in their programming slate.
But for GroupM’s Buchanan, there were other tried and tested “goodies” that caught her eye.
“Survivor Australia Vs The World. Who’s not gonna watch that? And then you’ve got Yellow Jackets, the Yellowstone prequel 1883, Big Brother, it’s just an awesome lineup.”
