John Halley, who was named head of the company’s ad sales efforts in 2022 following the merger between Paramount and former sibling CBS, will leave the media conglomerate after new management created a chief revenue officer to directly oversee sales efforts to Madison Avenue.
Halley, who has worked for Paramount Skydance and its predecessor companies for 18 years, will stay on through March and take on a new advisory role alongside Jay Askinashi, who was named chief revenue officer in October and officially took over in early November, a company spokesperson said.
Although Asinasi holds the title of chief revenue officer, his only responsibility is to oversee advertising. People familiar with Paramount’s sales department find the new structure awkward and wonder whether Mr. Halley will remain with the company long-term.
Paramount Skydance executives want to overhaul the company’s sales efforts, with a greater focus on consolidating the infrastructure underlying its streaming properties, as 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 in Publicis Groupe’s media buying practice and enjoys a reputation as an outgoing executive who is well-liked by clients and negotiators.
Mr. Halley is known as a skilled orchestrator of ad technology. During his time at Paramount, he built systems that often gave the company an edge over some rivals, especially as traditional media companies grappled with the transition to streaming. For years, Halley has set up a service that allows advertisers to buy impressions for specific types of viewers at Viacom. This is something that advertisers are increasingly focusing on in an era when more people are consuming programming through interactive, subscription-based outlets. He experimented with technology that would run commercials targeted to specific consumers, rather than CBS, which typically runs the type of ads that everyone sees at once. In recent years, Mr. Halley has fought to improve viewership aggregation across the CBS and Paramount cable networks’ digital platforms, at one point refusing to sign a new deal with Nielsen and instead striking a ratings deal with rival audience measurement service Video Amplifier. And he has played a key role in the development of the Television Industry Council, which helps vet new measurement services in hopes of establishing a broader range of vendors beyond Nielsen, which accounts for a significant portion of the media industry’s fixed costs.
Mr. Halley is also chairman of Open AP, a consortium working to facilitate so-called “audience buying,” deals based on narrower viewership groups defined by specific consumer attributes.
During his time at Paramount and Viacom, Mr. Halley helped bring ad-supported streamer Pluto to market and overhauled the company’s approach to the “upfront,” an annual industry sales market in which U.S. television networks seek to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory ahead of the next programming cycle. For the past several years, Paramount’s CBS has made an impression on Madison Avenue with a grand showcase booked each year at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Under Halley, the company instead opted for private meetings with various agencies and customers. This model has been praised by some for encouraging deeper conversations early in the sales process.
Paramount is working to renovate itself, even as it battles difficult market forces. In the company’s most recent fiscal quarter, TV revenue, one of its biggest drivers, fell 12%. Television advertising revenue also fell by 12%. Meanwhile, direct-to-consumer revenue increased 17%.
