Paramount’s First Upfront Under Skydance Touts Tech, Sports

Paramount Skydance held its first upfronts presentation for advertisers Thursday, gathering media buyers, talent and reporters on the Melrose Avenue lot to hear the new-ish company’s marketing pitch.

Paramount will continue the road show in the coming days, with several more meetings and events planned in markets including New York. But this week’s event — kicked off by CEO David Ellison, who had just made an appearance earlier in the day in Las Vegas for the company’s CinemaCon presentation — was perhaps the largest.

Coming a day after CBS unveiled its fall schedule — and had its own “CBS Fest” on the Paramount lot — it was the entire company’s turn to give its comprehensive pitch. Before Ellison came out, a new company branding video — narrated by Tom Cruise — showcased talent on the Paramount lot and featured heavy hitter creatives like Jerry Bruckheimer, James Cameron, the Duffer Brothers, Mark Wahlberg and Will Smith. (The same sizzle reel ran at CinemaCon earlier that day.)

“This moment is especially meaningful for us as it marks the first upfront as the new Paramount,” Ellison said, opening the upfront inside Paramount’s Sherry Lansing Theatre. “We launched Paramount Skydance nearly nine months ago, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the progress and momentum we’ve achieved in a relatively short period of time. Our goal is to build a leading media and entertainment company that strengthens competition, better serves the creative community and delivers even more compelling stories to audiences around the world.”

As a nod to the importance of live sports for the company, “The NFL Today” anchor James Brown hosted the upfront and introduced various execs.

There was no mention of the company’s impending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, but plenty of talk about how the company was focused on tech. Paramount also took the time to introduce three of its key players: During a sit-down, on-stage segment, chief revenue officer Jay Askinasi interviewed direct-to-consumer chair Cindy Holland and chief product officer Dane Glasgow about why they joined Paramount, and their plans for the future. The trio represent the new regime at Paramount assembled last fall after Ellison’s Skydance Media completed its $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global from Shari Redstone and National Amusements. Askinasi came to Paramount last October after heading ad sales for Roku and serving as CEO of Publicis Media Exchange U.S.

Holland credited next-day CBS series as “an incredibly important foundation” for Paramount+, in addition to NFL and other simulcast sports. She also credited the Taylor Sheridan series, including, most recently, “The Madison.” “Obviously, the NFL is a huge audience funnel, very large, very diverse, and we want to continue to program against different segments,” she said. “And the job is to increase the programming. We’re also going to welcome the BET+ community to Paramount+ [in June]. And it’s a privilege and an honor for us to welcome that community and their stories and bringing them to a larger audience as well.”

As for new programming for Paramount+, Holland said she was focused on more “female-forward” content, following the recent success of “The Madison,” starring Michelle Pfeiffer. That includes “Fear Not,” starring Anne Hathaway, and “Discretion,” starring Nicole Kidman and Hathaway.

“The audience for ‘Landman’ is about 50% women, but people perceive it in the slightly more male lens,” Holland said. “And we know that that female-forward ensemble shows, dramas, legal thrillers, soapy thrillers, are things that we were looking for.”

Glasgow also discussed the refocus of PlutoTV on the Gen Z audience: “When we look at our data, specifically for Pluto, the 18 to 34 year old segment is actually the fastest growing segment for us, 30% over the last year,” he said. What that means, the way that people are using our product is changing, and that’s exciting, because that means that we can deliver a whole new set of experiences and capabilities. We have talked publicly about the fact that we are converging the stacks for Pluto and Paramount+. But what that ultimately is going to mean is that we can deliver a significantly better experience for Pluto, and at the same time, we’re going to bring a bunch of new content together. So this summer, we’re going to be relaunching Pluto in a pretty significant way.”

As Variety recently reported, Pluto TV just added several The CW staples from the 2000s and 2010s, including “Hart of Dixie,” “Arrow,” “The 100” and “Everwood,” in a bid to program those young adults who have nostalgia for the shows of their youth.

Also during the upfront, Paramount TV Media chair George Cheeks and CBS Entertainment president Amy Reisenbach repeated Wednesday’s news about the Eye network’s fall schedule and its position in the marketplace.

A wide variety of clips included talent such as Helen Mirren (“Mobland”), Michelle Pfeiffer (“The Madison”), Nicole Kidman (“Lioness”), Zoe Saldaña (“Lioness”), Kathy Bates (“Matlock”), Kelly Reilly (“Dutton Ranch”) and Annette Bening (“Dutton Ranch”).

But noticeably, the focus was mostly on Paramount+, CBS Entertainment and CBS Sports — with no mention whatsoever of Paramount’s embattled CBS News division. Cable TV — once the bread and butter of Paramount — went virtually unmentioned, other than a quick flash of “South Park,” a few references to MTV’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the MTV Video Music Awards. It’s perhaps painfully clear cable is seen as the past, and this is a company now really eager to rebrand itself as tech-first.

“It’s all accelerated by technology,” Askinasi said. “We’re thinking and operating like a platform.”