Amid a chaotic year, Paramount is scaling its ads business

With a merger, major executive departures, and layoffs, it’s been a chaotic year for Paramount—but its ads business is still chugging along.

At an event on Tuesday in New York, Paramount Advertising brought together execs from several of its streaming and ad measurement partners, like Amazon and iSpot, to discuss how to marry content and commerce and take advantage of trends like the rise of shoppability in streaming.

Perfect pairings? Amazon is taking advantage of its own trove of customer journey data to power its advertising, according to Krishan Bhatia, the company’s VP of global video advertising, who joined the company from NBCU earlier this year. This year, Amazon “announced that we’re using one year’s worth of sales data to track top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel impact,” he said, data that he said could benefit Paramount and its other program partners whose streaming services are available as add-ons on Prime Video

“We can literally connect brand exposures that you might have had watching Thursday Night Football in the fall of ’24 to a purchase that you ultimately end up making, let’s say, Q2 or Q3 of next year,” Bhatia said. “I think you’ll start seeing investing in elongating the customer journey.”

Bhatia also noted Amazon’s investment in interactive pause ads, which rolled out earlier this year as it continues to broaden its streaming advertising offerings.

Marry me: As more brands look to place CTV ads, demand for more “democratized access” to attribution capabilities is growing, Stuart Schwartzapfel, EVP of media partnerships at iSpot, told the audience. In that vein, iSpot has built out attribution capabilities across campaigns beyond the biggest spenders, including for newer advertisers. ISpot started piloting its newer offerings with Paramount earlier this year after striking a currency measurement deal with the company in October 2023. Advertisers, particularly larger ones, are increasingly looking to “marry their first-party data with the sell side’s first-party data to do innovatively constructed buys that marry those two things,” Schwartzapfel said. “That’s not something every advertiser is asking for, but we are hearing it more and more.”

Sellevision: Consumers are increasingly beginning their product journeys through media properties rather than through search engines or retailers, Bryan Quinn, president and co-founder of retail media company Shopsense AI, said at the event. To capitalize on the trend, Shopsense AI partnered with Paramount earlier this year to target consumers through activations like April’s CMT Music Awards red carpet pre-show, where viewers could scan on-screen QR codes to shop looks and goods similar to those featured on screen.

Rachel Tipograph, founder and CEO of e-commerce software company MikMak, shared similar sentiments.

“Beauty, consumer electronics, food, alcohol: You ask them, ‘What percentage of your sales are you currently seeing through native checkout?’ It’s a rounding error,” she said. “Native checkout is for limited-edition hot Michael Jordans that would have sold out within a minute.”