Paramount Skips Carnegie Upfronts in 2023

 It’s rare for there to be an upfront week calendar shift, but this coming year Paramount Global will not be holding its traditional get-togethers at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment lawyer, Brandon Blake, looks at the shift in more detail.

Brandon Black

A Swing to Intimate

Instead of the traditional upfront presentation, Paramount Global released plans for a ‘series of high-impact, intimate gatherings’ with each of their major agency partners and clients. In 2022, we already saw them utilize an abbreviated presentation. But the swing away from Carnegie Hall entirely breaks a pattern we’ve seen for decades with first CBS and then Paramount holding fort there.

While 2022’s return to purely in-person events may have seemed like a return to the ‘norm,’ it also signaled a transformative time for the industry as a whole. So this likely won’t be the only novel reinvention of tried-and-true traditions we see, especially regarding the advertising industry’s relationship with Hollywood. 

A Changing Roster

With the rising interest in ad-supported and FAST streaming, we could see a few more seismic shifts before a new normal takes hold. Already, we’ve seen traditional broadcast advertising take a back seat to streaming in almost every 2022 presentation, with many thrusting their streaming platforms to the fore (Disney especially), and the intrusion of some new players, like YouTube, into the traditional upfront lineup.

However, we’ve also recently seen NBCUniversal commit to a fully in-person upfront at their regular Radio City Music Hall spot, so despite Paramount’s absence from their usual high-profile presentation, the 2023 upfronts is likely to be a bustling space. Will we see other innovative takes on how the upfronts will run, or will Paramount remain an outlier with their new strategy? It’s too early to tell, but the answer will be interesting indeed.