Paramount, a Skydance Corporation (NASDAQ: PSKY) opened its first upfront under new ownership on April 16 at the Sherry Lansing Theatre on the Melrose lot, with a freshly built ad-sales bench: Chief Revenue Officer Jay Askinasi, hired from Roku, Inc. (NASDAQ: ROKU) and appointed October 9, 2025, and head of U.S. ad sales Danielle Carney, who started March 9, 2026 after running live sports and video sales at Prime Video, the streaming arm of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).
The pairing is the cleanest read on what David Ellison wants 2026 ad sales to look like. Paramount Skydance is the first Big-4 streaming-and-broadcast company to put platform-pedigree at both the CRO and U.S.-head seats simultaneously, replacing a 17-year Viacom/CBS lineage that ran through John Halley and, before him, Jo Ann Ross. The “streaming fixed unit” and programmatic-sports announcements that anchored the L.A. pitch follow from who is in the room. The product layer trails the personnel layer.
Variety, AdExchanger, and TheWrap each published April 16 reads on the pitch. Variety and TheWrap describe the format as fixed pod positions on premium episodes for the first seven days after new-episode debut. Askinasi told AdExchanger the product addresses a streaming inventory pool that has been “mostly rotational and not always as transparent.” On sports, AdExchanger and TheWrap narrowed Variety’s broader programmatic framing: live in-game programmatic insertion is currently UFC-only, launched January 2026, with CBS Sports expansion planned for fall 2026.
Halley, the 17-year ad-sales architect who built Pluto TV’s ad business and replaced traditional upfront week with the dinners format Paramount still uses, announced his exit December 1, 2025 and stayed in an advisory role through March. Adweek independently reported Carney’s hire the same day Variety broke it, citing an internal memo Adweek had obtained. Askinasi told Variety the dinners give Paramount “one-to-one dialogue” with buyers.
Q3 2026 earnings will be the first quantitative read on whether the new bench moved CPMs or programmatic mix; the cycle is also Paramount’s last as a stand-alone seller before the Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) deal closes.
