Late last week, Netflix walked away from plans to acquire Warner Bros., clearing the way for Paramount Skydance to scoop up the whole company with its hostile takeover bid.
I know it’s not anyone’s fault that the announcement dropped so soon after Paramount and WBD posted their respective Q4 earnings, rendering our coverage of both reports immediately out of date. It still stings, though.
Listeners of The Big Story podcast may recall how much I objected to a potential Netflix acquisition way back in December, so suffice it to say that my frustration with the Paramount/Warner Bros. news extends well beyond the timing.
But, putting those feelings aside, if this merger really does happen (and it still might not!), what would it mean on a practical level for the TV advertising industry writ large?
Advertising platforms
In December, I theorized that a Netflix buyout would be bad news for anybody working on NEO, WBD’s ad sales platform. After all, the Netflix Ad Suite is now working well three years after its launch, both in terms of revenue (it keeps doubling every year) and the ability to livestream. (The recently renamed Actor Awards, for example, seemed to go off without a hitch.)
Paramount, meanwhile, launched its own sell-serve ad platform for Paramount+ and Pluto TV back in 2024, but doesn’t yet have a fully unified back-end tech stack, according to what President Jeff Shell told investors last year.
NEO is technically live now, albeit only with a “select group of beta partners,” WBD’s digital ad sales lead Ryan Gould wrote in November. But it’s designed to give access to all of the company’s video inventory across both streaming and linear. That could provide a lot of value to Paramount, which is looking for a similar solution for its own inventory.
On the other hand, multibillion-dollar financial transactions take a long time to close. Paramount can’t wait around to integrate WBD’s technology into its own platform, which is why it’s already reorganizing with plans in mind to converge its own tech stack – likely making the eventual consolidation with NEO even trickier to navigate.
Executive leadership
And speaking of consolidation!
WBD and Paramount are more similar to one another than either is to Netflix, meaning we should expect more redundancies at the executive level if the merger happens. As TV journalist Lesley Goldberg recently pointed out in The Ankler, WBD CEO David Zaslav alone has 16 direct reports, nine of whom also carry CEO titles.
There have been several notable departures from Paramount’s advertising business since the Skydance merger last year, including former ad sales president John Halley in December and EVP of Agency Partnerships Chris Simon last month.
At the same time, Paramount has also made some interesting new hires. Along with Jay Askinasi, who joined as CRO in October, this week saw the addition of Amazon ad sales vet Danielle Carney as head of US sales and Chris Brady as EVP of Paramount Media Labs, the company’s brand storytelling arm.
If Paramount Skydance successfully snaps up Warner Bros., then I wouldn’t be surprised if WBD’s leadership team (and, indeed, its overall headcount) is cut further in favor of Paramount’s new hires. Or, perhaps, an even newer slate of talent will replace everybody, which is what appears to be happening with Paramount Skydance now.
Streaming services
But I have one more point to make and, I’ll admit, I left this bit for last because it annoys me the most. (Sorry, I promise I’m still trying to be impartial!)
Because time is a flat circle and we are apparently doomed to repeat history forever, Paramount CEO David Ellison is already telling investors that he wants to merge Paramount+ and HBO Max into a single streaming behemoth.
If this plan sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because Discovery Global had originally announced plans to combine Discovery+ and HBO Max after its acquisition of Warner Bros. closed in mid 2022. That’s why the platform changed its name to Max the following year.
The initial idea, Zaslav told investors at the time, was to make HBO Max feel more family-friendly and reduce churn by introducing content from Discovery+.
Except, Discovery+ never actually went anywhere. Because the app was already profitable and relatively cheap to maintain, WBD’s leadership decided not to risk losing any of its 20 million subscribers. There was no guarantee they’d follow their favorite reality shows over to a service that costs twice as much.
Instead, WBD got lambasted by the press for replacing its own original content with reality shows from Discovery’s lineup, only to remove all those reality shows two years later after rebranding back to HBO Max in 2025.
In any case, let’s assume Ellison is a man of his word – or, at least, one who chooses not to learn from the mistakes of the recent past.
Merging these two major streaming platforms could decrease the amount of available ad inventory for marketers. But it would also cut costs, both for the newly combined entity and for the 7.6 million US households that already subscribe to both.
So, will it work? Who knows. All I can say is, it certainly didn’t last time!
