Paramount is creating new opportunities for brands to create custom social advertising featuring athletes during major sporting events including the Super Bowl, which will air next year on Paramount-owned channels CBS and Nickelodeon. The media company will launch a new division within its branded content unit called CBS Sports Creator Studio, devoted to its sports properties including the NFL, PGA and college football and basketball, among others.

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The new content studio, which is a formalization of existing capabilities, will offer brands three main options, said John Bogusz, executive VP sports, Paramount Advertising. The first allows brands to partner with Paramount on influencer content surrounding tentpole events, such as a celebrity or sports influencer posting from a pre-game activation or an exclusive party. The second pairs advertisers with CBS Sports talent to showcase behind-the-scenes content for its TV coverage. The third aligns brands with a “white label” influencer, such as an athlete or influencer not employed by Paramount, to develop content aligned to a specific sport, season or event.

To be sure, Paramount has been in the branded content game for some time—prior to the merger of Viacom and CBS in 2019, Viacom had its branded content studio called Velocity, which put brands alongside its entertainment IP on social as far back as 2014. Bogusz said CBS Sports Creator Studio comes as Paramount has been more significantly investing in social media content after its acquisition of influencer agency WhoSay in 2018, as well as the immense growth for CBS Sports’ social channels.

For example, CBS Sports’ main TikTok channel has 3.8 million followers as of writing, about 1 million more than this time last year, according to social stat tracker Social Blade. The networks’ social content gets a boost during peak seasons, such as during the NFL Playoffs—CBS Sports’ YouTube channel saw a spike of over 130 million views in January 2023, per Social Blade. Citing internal numbers, Paramount says it has mustered over 1 billion social engagements and 11 billion video views so far this year across its social channels.

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But perhaps more appealing are the followers of the influencers that CBS Sports will tap to partner with brands. As sports have gone further onto digital platforms, such as Amazon and YouTube picking up NFL rights and incorporating their own creator networks, influencers have become an increasingly important part of the sports marketing strategy.

The CBS Sports roster includes 3 million influencers tracked by Paramount’s influencer dashboard, The Match Report, as well as talent from across the company’s brand portfolio, which includes celeb-heavy networks such as MTV, BET and Paramount+, among others. Bogusz also said the custom content can run on a number of platforms, including a CBS Sports pregame show on linear TV, online video and mobile. 

The scale of content created with the CBS Sports Creator Studio is flexible, said Ryan Briganti, senior VP of sports sales at Paramount. The partnership might act as an add-on for a major advertiser that has purchased Super Bowl inventory, or it might allow a smaller business without “the deep pockets for broadcast TV” to get into the Paramount ecosystem. While Briganti declined to disclose specific pricing, he said the partnership can be bespoke to a marketer’s budget.

For example, content generated for a broadcast pregame “has a different set of costs and investment than content creation that’s solely going to live with white label influencers where we’re not using any of our IP,” said Briganti.

Briganti added that surrounding Paramount’s core media with “different extensions that support different verticals of marketing—it opens [the company] up to a deeper roster of advertisers and partners. We want to get our hooks in every brand out there, whether it’s a big hook, medium hook or little hook,” Briganti said. “We’re just finding more ways to connect with them.”