Media buyers, here’s one more streaming ad unit to potentially factor into holiday budgets.
This week, Paramount rolled out Streaming Fixed Units, an offering that lets brands activate against the first seven days of new episodes of some of Paramount+’s most popular shows, including Tulsa King, Landman, and Mayor of Kingstown.
The standard units are 30 seconds long, with Paramount offering separate pricing options for shorter or longer lengths, Leo O’Connor, EVP of streaming at Paramount Advertising, told Marketing Brew. The units will play during standard ad breaks (the second ad break in a Paramount+ show, for example, has 90 seconds of time available, enough for three 30-second slots.)
Advertisers from the AI, travel, and quick-serve restaurant categories have already bought up Streaming Fixed Units, which are designed to provide premium inventory during some of Paramount+’s most coveted programming at the time when most people are tuning in, O’Connor said. Western-wear brands have also taken an interest in the ad format to show up against the Taylor Sheridan shows, he noted.
“We saw that this filled this need in the market to eventize these big drops of new episodes,” O’Connor said. “This is something that’s available today in sports. I think there’s a lot that’s being said about that in the industry, but we felt like there was some white space on the entertainment side to do a similar type of execution, where you could find a huge audience doing the same thing at once and have a brand own that moment.”
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Months in the making: Paramount, which is in the midst of navigating a massive merger with Skydance, has been adding to its ad offerings this year. In January, its broadcast of the AFC Championship game between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs featured shoppable ads. The same month, it joined peers like Roku and NBCUniversal in partnering on Comcast’s Universal Ads platform for small- and medium-sized businesses.
In March, the company unveiled a measurement partnership with iSpot that implements iSpot’s Outcomes at Scale offering, giving advertisers information about conversion rates.
The new ad format announced this week is designed to offer advertisers even more ways to get in on the company’s streaming inventory, O’Connor said.
“This is meant to complement the already existing programmatic and audience targeting capabilities that we have,” he said. “This is not meant to signal a departure from that type of selling…Breaking through with the Streaming Fixed Unit and then following up that buy with more precision-targeted programmatic across Paramount+ and Pluto TV, we think that’s the formula.”