The new Paramount+ ad subscription service offers choice, flexibility, and value. For advertisers there is another big plus: high value, hyper-engaged consumers.

Over the last decade, the desire to reach Gen Z and Millennials has left brands with limited options and often uncomfortable choices: choose a platform that promotes disinformation or support a respected news source with less viewers; place your message next to low grade user generated content or focus on quality over quantity to protect brand values; constantly weighing up a business need with a societal responsibility.

But things are changing rapidly. The blind eye to misinformation is now wide open, aware of the cost to brand trust and sometimes even democracy itself. Money is leaving right wing pundits and choosing a more optimistic environment. Even doomsday blogs may soon come to a prophetic end, starved of ad dollars, not to mention ideas. But in parallel to these attitudinal changes, there are new audience opportunities. For the first time, you can reach the hardest to reach without compromise.

A starring role for brands

The launch of the Paramount+ ad tier is a watershed moment, and not just for us as the local arm of a global content powerhouse. This new subscription service offers a complementary audience play for advertisers already benefitting from the ongoing rise in BVOD viewing (10 Play is up 37 per cent year-on-year*). Over the coming weeks and months, audiences many thought were hard to reach, will be easy to engage. Viewers some believed were lost will be found. And the distracted younger audiences will be sitting down to hours of TV - almost half watching for three hours or more in one stretch.

We are not alone in this ad-supported streaming offering, however the role it plays within our broader advertising ecosystem is unique. We are the only all platform Total TV buy in market. This gives advertisers confidence knowing there are more ways to reach the right audiences, delivering tailored solutions that connect across a reticulated audience as they grow, move and return.

Streaming offers a new level of attention ensuring advertisers can reach the most engaged, leant-in fans, all within an ultra-premium environment that combines the production values of a cinema experience with the targeting and business-outcome performance of digital. What’s more, the Paramount+ ad tier will be sold by a team who understand the value exchange with viewers, people in market for years not weeks. One point of entry offering frictionless solutions across multiple platforms.

Why are we confident?

We’ve learnt from others while gaining insight from our 71 million global subscribers, 30 market launches and numerous feedback sessions with agencies globally and locally. We know the ad-supported viewership is best built by introducing a tier rather than surprising (and annoying) viewers. We know that around 30 per cent will choose the ad tier, bringing in new subscribers as well as switching existing loyalists. We also know from our success in Canada and the US that choosing the ad supported service is not just a decision by the ‘budget conscious’. Inflationary pressure and market maturity has led to an inevitable streamlining of streaming services. Value seeking is not isolated to one demo. It is uniform across age groups and income levels. In fact, the real value sought by households is content that appeals to the whole household. This ‘family of needs’ strategy gives Paramount+ a significant advantage in market. Dora for pre-school, PAW Patrol for young kids, Sonic for teens, Ninja Turtles for young adults, and the Taylor Sheridan universe for everyone else in the house, and the planet.

Why ‘quality’ is the new ‘safety’?

Research by the Marketing Scientist Group has revealed just how important context and environment is for brands. Integrating in and around quality content improves trust and purchase intent, ultimately making your advertising more effective. We see this already with our top franchises and 10 Play formats. Ad-supported streaming elevates this to another level. Our most anticipated Paramount+ series, exclusive originals and blockbuster movies have production values in the millions per hour which sets the benchmark for ‘quality screens’, a metric valued by advertisers for attention and salience. And one that arguably should be stressed more than brand safety, which in all respects is just business as usual, or good brand hygiene (an apt term given some of the unhygienic content on some platforms). Put another way, quality is the new brand safe choice.

Lifting the creative bar for us and you

The small screen (or not so small in most homes these days) has shaken off the myth that it is cinema’s poorer cousin. Now the best writers, producers and creators enjoy the longer form storytelling, the richer character development, not to mention the budgets. The same may happen for advertisers. Cinema advertising often attracted the higher-end television commercial, but this will probably shift to streaming given the less intrusive ad loads, ad product innovation, data informed placement and unique integration opportunities which can live in perpetuity. In the same way that the Super Bowl has raised the bar for advertising, this heightened world of entertainment will encourage and reward the best creative work – a bonus for viewers, agency creatives and clients.

Explorers welcome

Paramount+ ad tiers is available now, offering a mountain of entertainment at a low, competitive price point while raising the bar on how brands play a role in the very best storytelling. For the industry, it represents a change in the storyline. You could say, and I can’t help myself, that Paramount+ is part of a new frontier in marketing. A way for brands to seek out new storylines and new screens, and boldly go where no brand has gone before.

*Source: OzTAM National VPM, Weeks 1-24 2024 vs. 2023, Total minutes viewed.