Paramount promotes Lee Sears to president of international ad sales

Paramount Global has promoted Lee Sears to the new position of president of international markets advertising sales.

The promotion is the second in the past year for Sears. In June 2023, he was named executive vice-president, head of international ad sales and integrated marketing.

In his new role, Sears will lead international sales teams across streaming, pay-TV and free-to-air broadcasters, with the goal of uniting the company’s commercial portfolio outside the US.

Paramount’s Australia and Latin America commercial leaders will report to Sears, who will also oversee the company’s advertising relationship with Sky Media in the UK.

Sears will report to Paramount Advertising president John Halley and Paramount CEO and president of international markets, global consumer products and experiences, Pam Kaufman.

Paramount’s portfolio includes UK free-to-air public broadcaster Channel 5. My5, Channel 5’s broadcast VOD service, is set to merge with Paramount’s free ad-supported TV channel Pluto TV in the near future.

Paramount set to merge My5 and Pluto in UK streaming shakeup

‘Global ambition, local execution’

At The Media Leader‘s Future of TV Advertising Global event in December 2023, Sears said that services such as Paramount+, Pluto TV and My5 all offer access to growing audiences for advertisers, but that Paramount has done significant work in the back end to simplify the ad-buying experience to address concerns over media fragmentation.

“All of that inventory is in the same place,” he told editor-in-chief Omar Oakes. “What that means is all that fragmentation is going to be consolidated. So we have audiences across all of those platforms, all of those devices, that we can now serve ads to.”

In response to an audience question about Paramount’s increasingly global, rather than local, organisational structure, Sears added that getting the balance right between global brands and local, tailored programming was key. “We use the phrase a lot, ‘glocal’, which is global ambition but local execution,” he explained.

“Globally, we want to be easier to work with.”

In a prescient exchange, Sears also talked about the “unification of the team” across the commercial portfolio. “That’s making sure that the teams in market are actually selling all of those things, so you don’t have a Pluto team, you don’t have a linear team — you just have a Paramount team that can then access all of that inventory.

“It’s important to put it all together, because I don’t think fragmentation is going to go away. Technology has meant that there’s much more access to content across different platforms and different devices. The job is making sure we can be there — everywhere that the audience is — and then thread the needle to make sure that we can provide scalable audiences, no matter where they are.”