John Halley, who was named to lead Paramount’s advertising sales efforts in 2022 following the company’s merger with former corporate sibling CBS, will leave the media conglomerate after new managers installed a chief revenue officer who was given direct supervision of outreach to Madison Avenue.
Halley, who has worked at Paramount Skydance and its predecessor companies for 18 years, will stay on through March, according to a company spokesperson, and will take up an new advisory role alongside Jay Askinasi, who was named chief revenue officer in October and officially started his role in early November.
While Askinasi holds the title of chief revenue officer, his duties entail only the oversight of advertising., People familiar with Paramount’s sales division felt the new structure was an awkward one, and wondered if Halley would continue to work at the company over the longer term.
Executives at Paramount Skydance are eager to overhaul the company’s sales efforts, focusing more intently on unifying the infrastructure underlying its streaming assets, part of a larger mission to compete with digital giants such as Amazon, Google and Netflix. Still, while Askinasi previously oversaw sales for Roku, his time on the sales side of the business is limited. He is best known for his work as a senior executive for Publicis Groupe’s media buying operations, and enjoys a reputation as a gregarious executive who is well-liked by clients and negotiating partners.
Halley is known as a skilled orchestrator of ad-tech. During his time at Paramount, he built systems that often gave the company an edge over some of its rivals, particularly as traditional media companies grappled with moves into streaming. Halley has over the years set up offerings that allowed advertisers to buy specific kinds of viewer impressions at Viacom, something advertisers are increasingly focused on in an era when more people are watching programs via interactive subscription-based outlets. He experimented with technology that puts commercials aimed at specific consumers over CBS, which typically runs the type of ads everyone sees at once. In recent years, Halley fought for better tabulation of viewers of CBS and Paramount’s cable networks via their digital platforms, refusing for a time to sign a new deal with Nielsen and instead setting up a ratings contract with VideoAmp, a rival audience measurement service. And he has played an instrumental role in the development of a TV-industry council helping to vet new measurement offerings in hopes of setting up a wider array of vendors beyond Nielsen, whose fees are no small part of the media sector’s fixed costs.
Halley is also chairman of Open AP, a consortium that has worked to facilitate so-called “audience buying,” or deals based on narrower segments of viewership defined by specific consumer attributes.
During his tenure at Paramount and Viacom, Halley helped bring the ad-supported streamer Pluto to market, and overhauled the company’s approach to the “upfront,” the annual industry sales market during which U.S. TV networks try to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of their next cycle of programming. In years past, Paramount’s CBS made an impression on Madison Avenue with a grand showcase booked each year at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Under Halley, the company opted instead for private meetings with different agencies and clients — a model that has been praised in some quarters as facilitating deeper conversations earlier in the sales process.
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Paramount is working to retrofit itself even as it contends with difficult market forces. In its most recent fiscal quarter, the company saw TV revenue — one of its biggest drivers — fall 12%. Ad revenue tied to TV fell 12% as well. Meanwhile, revenue from direct to consumer operations rose 17%.
From Variety US