Paramount sees marketing benefits in content franchises | WARC | The Feed

Paramount sees marketing benefits in content franchises

Paramount, the media company rebranded from ViacomCBS earlier this year, believes its established content franchises are a major benefit with regards to the cost of marketing and attracting audiences.

Why it matters

One element of growing competition in the streaming industry is access to popular films and TV shows. This material is a draw for the existing fanbase, and also presents an opportunity to launch reboots, spinoffs and other content extensions.

Takeaways

• Naveen Chopra, Paramount’s chief financial officer, noted that marketing is one of the “biggest lines” on the profit-and-loss sheet for media owners.

• “A key question to ask in this area is, “What do you have to spend to acquire and retain customers?” he said at the MoffettNathanson Media & Communications Summit.
• “Being a “traditional media company” that has a growing business in the streaming category is an advantage here, according to Chopra.
• “We have a great stable of well known IP [and] big franchises that have built-in audiences,” he said.

Intellectual property has lasting value

• Paramount’s content assets include everything from the movie “Top Gun” to kids’ TV show “Paw Patrol”, hit drama series “Yellowstone” and sci-fi property “Star Trek”.
• “From a marketing perspective, we've got these built-in promotional platforms that are incredibly valuable,” Chopra said.
• He pointed to the recent “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie as an example of an established brand that retains an instant appeal in movie theatres and, then, on streaming platforms.
• “That audience will find that content. We don't have to go spend the tens of millions of dollars that you would if it's an entirely new piece of IP,” said Chopra.

The curious case of “Yellowstone”

• Another example is “1883”, an exclusive series launched on the Paramount+ streaming platform in late 2021, and a spinoff of “Yellowstone”, a huge cable TV hit for Paramount.

• Due to a licensing agreement, “Yellowstone” itself is exclusively available to stream in full on Peacock, a platform operated by NBCUniversal.

• But this deal helped the show further build its viewership, according to Chopra, and thus develop an audience hungry for related content like “1883”.

• “By the time we moved it over to Paramount+ as an exclusive,” Chopra said of the latter show, “it already had an audience that was going to follow it.”

Sourced from Seeking Alpha