Courtesy of Paramount
Viewers who tuned in to reruns of “Yellowstone” on CBS Sunday night got something they might not have expected — two commercials urging them to watch the show elsewhere.
CBS sold national advertising time during the broadcast to competitor NBCUniversal, which ran a commercial on its streaming hub Peacock highlighting the Western drama series’ availability. “Peacock has all the episodes of ‘Yellowstone,'” the commercial says over graphics that appear over scenes from the show. “Stream every season now.” Peacock owns the streaming rights to the show, although it is produced by CBS parent company Paramount Global, which airs the series first on its television networks. “This is a declaration of war,” says a “Yellowstone” character at the end of the spot.
The advertising agreement shows how much the advent of streaming has changed relationships between strong competitors like NBC and CBS. Paramount Global generates revenue from the sale of the “Yellowstone” rights to Peacock and from the Peacock commercial — even as NBC tries to break into CBS’ audience pool to attract new viewers to the show.
The “Yellowstone” episodes would not air on CBS under normal circumstances. The network is operating it as a kind of stopgap amid months of strikes by Hollywood’s writers and actors unions. Still, the reruns seem to be a hit. A two-hour block of “Yellowstone” drew more than six million viewers to the channel when it debuted last week. A live audience of this size cannot be ignored by any advertiser.
Still, the idea of letting a rival come in to poach viewers carries some risk — a move akin to a homeowner allowing termites to invade a home and gnaw at its innards. Still, in recent years, TV networks have been happy to sell valuable advertising time to new competitors who use the commercial breaks to essentially tell viewers to use their remote controls to watch something interesting on one of their services. Of course, to do this, the couch potatoes have to stop watching normal television.
The flood of TV advertising from new tech players such as Amazon, Netflix, Google and Hulu has increased, contrary to the TV industry’s previous policy. For decades, television networks kept their competitors away from national commercial breaks because they assumed that viewers who saw such promotions would change the channel, taking their viewership with them. As HBO made its name with groundbreaking series like “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “True Blood,” it often focused its marketing on eye-catching print advertising and clever web marketing, since many television networks had banned doors to ads for the shows. In the past, television networks didn’t even run ads featuring actors who appeared on competitors’ shows. Case in point: In 1997, General Motors’ Cadillac ran an ad featuring actor Dennis Franz as a police officer handing out a traffic ticket. At the time, he was starring as a police officer on the ABC series “NYPD Blue.” CBS and NBC vetoed the spot.
In another time, companies that tried such things had to do so in secret. For several weeks in 2004, Time Warner ran ads for off-network reruns of the CBS show “Without a Trace” during local time on broadcasts of “ER.” Why? Because CBS aired “Without A Trace” during the same broadcast period. “If you saw ‘ER’ on Thursday night,” says a narrator, “you missed the drama that critics call… gripping.” Stylish. Addictive.” NBC was not immediately aware of the ploy because the spots were sold by individual network partners rather than the network itself.
Even today, the directive still influences who can advertise where. Despite increasingly relaxed rules in network television, many streamers do not accept commercials from competitors. Netflix, Max and Disney’s Hulu and Disney+ will not accept advertising that promotes competing streaming services or the shows that run on them, according to executives familiar with the policies. And Paramount+, part of Paramount Global, tends to only accept ads from streaming competitors the company may already do business with, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Running Peacock’s “Yellowstone” spots could boost Paramount’s revenue. As more people watch the series on the NBC lot, executives there may want to expand their rights to the show. And since the CBS episodes are reruns, Paramount executives may have been betting that the series’ core audience has already seen them — and may be streaming something else right now.