Why ViacomCBS Rebranded CBS All Access as Paramount+

Key Insights:The new name references the prestige of Paramount Pictures while leaving room for further brand definition.ViacomCBS is considering sunseting some of its niche streamers, while offering bundling discounts of others, like BET+, with Paramount+. Hayes Roth remembers the first time Paramount Pictures' logo really stuck with him. It was his first time watching Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the snow-capped mountain from the film studio’s logo fades into a similar peak just before Indiana Jones begins his latest adventure. “That scene embedded the brand in an interesting way with me,” said Roth, the founder of brand consultancy HA Roth Consulting. “There’s something exciting about when you see that logo, because you know you are about to be thrust into a new world.” That’s good news for ViacomCBS, which, after rebranding cable channel Spike as Paramount Network two years ago, is once again using the Paramount moniker for another major outlet. This time, it will be for its subscription video streaming service, currently named CBS All Access. On Tuesday, ViacomCBS said CBS All Access will rebrand as Paramount+ early next year, just as the platform expands into international markets like Australia and the Nordic countries. There was mixed reaction to the name change online, with some welcoming the Paramount rebranding and others wondering why the company would scrap six years of CBS All Access brand equity to become yet another streaming service with a plus sign in its title. But in an ultracompetitive streaming space where global growth is proving crucial to streamers’ long-term growth, branding experts and ViacomCBS execs alike say Paramount+ may serve to give ViacomCBS a leg up in international markets. “Paramount is the most well-known brand we have globally, and it sits up there at the top of big entertainment brands,” said Marc DeBevoise, chief digital officer of ViacomCBS and CEO and president of CBS Interactive. “Movies have been going around with that curtain-raiser brand on them for 100 years. There’s so much equity in that brand, that name and that logo.” The 2019 Viacom-CBS merger all but ensured the CBS All Access name, a somewhat literal moniker spelling out to consumers exactly what they were getting with a subscription, would become less precise as the service was quickly injected with programming from Viacom brands like Comedy Central and MTV. There was some consideration to keeping the original name, but CBS as an entertainment brand isn’t as recognizable as Paramount is in other territories. “Even in Australia when we launched All Access there, they refer to it as the network we own there: 10 All Access,” DeBevoise said. While Paramount has a century of history with audiences around the world, it is also something of an open book, giving the company some room to define and clarify the type of entertainment product for which Paramount stands. Roth said the name came with good connotations but remained “open-ended,” and would leave room for a more precise definition through marketing materials. “It's a brand name everybody knows, whether they know what is inside it or not,” Roth said. “With Paramount, I have no fixed idea of what their brand DNA is, because I don’t really know the difference between Paramount films versus Universal films in terms of preconceived notion. What I do know is it’s about film, and it's about exciting products.” ViacomCBS’ own research bears that out. “[Paramount] is not necessarily specifically defined other than that it means big entertainment to those audiences,” DeBevoise said. “The big transition that we need to make is that it doesn’t stand for news or sports right now.” That doesn’t mean the new name is knocking the socks off of branding experts. The choice to use a plus sign in the name means the service joins a somewhat tired naming trope that has been used by everyone from streamers (Apple TV+ and Disney+) and tech companies (the now-defunct Google+) to ecommerce subscriptions like Walmart+. “When I first saw it, I thought, really? You’re jumping on the plus bandwagon; that’s the best you can do?” said Joe Tradii, a branding and marketing expert and the founder and principal consultant at JAT Consults. “But I thought about it more, and it hints to a bigger strategy and a longer-range strategy, especially as the Paramount brand is known more overseas." While the shorthand might prompt eye-rolling among industry watchers, it’s a simple signifier to potential subscribers of the kind of paid offering that Paramount+ will be, DeBevoise said. As executives sifted through other possibilities for names, including Paramount All Access, they realized there was another plus to the plus sign. “Frankly, we needed to keep in mind that it has to be compact,” DeBevoise said. “The name has to work in smaller sizes, it has to appear across multiple devices, and a single-word brand name is better than a multiword brand name in most instances.” The new name will mark the end of an era for CBS All Access, which came onto the scene in 2014 as one of the earliest streaming video entrants from a legacy television company. That means ViacomCBS is now tasked with transitioning brand equity the company had built with CBS All Access fans to something new. “CBS All Access, thanks to Star Trek: Picard and other originals, has some great brand equity,” Tradii said. “What are they going to do with that? You’ve got to go recapture all of that brand love that got built up through their own efforts and the public acting on its own for years and years.” By DeBevoise’s account, that is the plan. The CBS brand will remain a visible and crucial portion of the service, he said, as will the other stand-alone brands that will be part of Paramount+, including Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and Smithsonian. All of those brands, which appear as stand-alone tiles in CBS All Access' newly revamped interface, will be leveraged in marketing to funnel users to the broader offering. And as Paramount+ continues its build-out, ViacomCBS may also sunset some the smaller, niche streamers in the company portfolio. “Some of them will not exist in the long run, but we’re still working through which of the really small ones that don’t make a ton of sense,” DeBevoise said. The company is exploring further payment bundles with smaller streamers like BET+ and Noggin—neither of which are in consideration for being phased out—as part of Paramount+'s offering to further entice customers, DeBevoise said. (The service already struck up one such bundle to offer both All Access and Showtime OTT to Apple TV+ subscribers.) Brands, of course, aren’t built overnight. ViacomCBS has said the rebrand will be accompanied by considerable marketing muscle, which Roth said will be crucial to defining what, in fact, Paramount+ will mean in the eyes of consumers. Experts agree that marketing campaign—which is still under wraps—will be crucial to whether the rebranding is a hit with consumers. “If you build the architecture right and stick with it and message it right, eventually you can have success,” Tradii said. “It’ll just take time and money.”

Streaming & OTT

Why ViacomCBS Rebranded CBS All Access as Paramount+ and Not Paramount All Access

The moniker will help internationally, despite undoing 6 years of brand equity

Kelsey Sutton

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Kelsey Sutton