Paramount’s Daly Wants To Be The Cultural Compass For Marketers

MIAMI — Marketers once had a straightforward mission: understand the audience, devise a campaign, and deliver it, mostly through TV spots.

The multi-platform era of fragmentation has changed all that, and Lydia Daly is trying to understand the new world.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Daly, SVP, Audience Impact & Intelligence, Paramount, paints a contrasting picture of today’s media insights landscape.

Resonance at Live Speed

“It’s much more complex than it ever was before,” Daly explains. “You need to be ready and prepared to lean into trends as they’re happening, often on social media.”

But it’s not just about chasing every trend. Daly highlights the importance of discernment in a marketer’s strategy. “You need to understand when as a marketer you should be capitalizing on that moment, understanding the difference between noise and a signal that you should be leaning into,” she asserts.

When brands approach Paramount for campaign collaboration, they’re seeking more than just visibility. “They want to make sure that what they’re creating is either going to be relevant in terms of trends with their target audience, or it’s going to create something that can kind of inspire virality and not just be a simple marketing campaign,” Daly says.

“We work very closely with our partners, first of all, helping them understand these different generations and audiences.” Once that understanding is in place, creativity can be tailored to appeal to the specific audience in question.

Adapting Creatives to Cultural Conversations

Daly says Paramount tries to plug brands into “broader cultural conversations”.

Paramount works with a broad spectrum of brands, from thought leadership initiatives to fully integrated marketing campaigns.

Daly highlights the importance of live events: “Audiences are trying to gravitate and centralize themselves around those big monocultural moments. They want to be part of that conversation.”

Measuring Success and Proving Impact

On the topic of performance and ROI, Daly’s team is dedicated to providing concrete results. “We’re delivering studies in terms of attribution, in terms of brand lift, whatever the objective or the KPI of the campaign,” she states. With the advent of connected TV, Paramount is endeavoring to offer performance proof across the advertising funnel – a new trick for TV, a medium that was historically challenged to measure outcomes at the purchase point.

“We can actually prove attribution. We can prove delivery in a way that we weren’t able to before,” Daly adds.

You’re watching ‘Anything Is Possible: The Rising Tide of Programmatic Streaming,’ a Beet.TV Leadership Series at POSSIBLE 2024, presented by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.