Paramount’s Steve Ellis On The Proven Impact Of TV Advertising

As part of our TVREV In Cannes series, we sat down with Steve Ellis, COO of Paramount Advertising, to discuss his take on why TV advertising is still so impactful and why it’s so important to measure ad effectiveness.

STEVE ELLIS: In premium video advertising, 30-second, non-skippable ads have been a proven format for decades. However, there have been challenges in the recent past because in a silo of either broadcast or cable, the conversation is a bit about aging audiences and declining audiences.

At Paramount, we have built a very large streaming ad-supported infrastructure as well, including Pluto and Paramount+.

When you combine that with our broadcaster cable footprint, we reach nearly 200 million people in America every month. That is the audience. Now we need to focus our attention, our client's attention, and our partner's attention on the effectiveness of the format.

For many years, there's been a focus, understandably, on the growth of audiences on social platforms. They're very popular, but they're also very effective in their own way. However, they are three, four, five-second video ad platforms, and you can skip them. In our case, we believe this format is proven more effective.

It's up to us to raise the standard and the awareness that that effectiveness is worth something in the space, especially when you have the reach we do.

I think looking forward through the rest of the year, you will hear us at Paramount Advertising repeat over and over again that we want to see more assessment of the effectiveness of the format in advertising that you're using.

In today's marketing world, you need to do all of it. It's just what it is. There's not one or the other. You need to do 30-second ads on a 60-inch screen, and you need to do three-second ads on a six-inch screen, and everything in between.

So we're very keen to focus on how that spread can create the best outcomes, and measuring those outcomes will be really important to the future too.

So you'll see us do more of that as well—improve our measurement capabilities, performance capabilities, and raise our platform standards up to the level that other platforms have set.