Pluto TV’s Olivier Jollet applies lessons learned from music industry

In May, Olivier Jollet was promoted to EVP and International GM of Pluto TV, Paramount Global’s free ad supported streaming TV service. He’s funneling enthusiasm, calculated risk-taking and disruption into the TV realm – an industry that’s constantly changing.

Just this week, Pluto TV marked its latest launch with an entrance into Canada in partnership with Corus Entertainment, with the FAST service now live in over 35 countries across three continents.

Jollet, 43, is well-suited to a fast-paced and constantly changing industry landscape, having cut his teeth in the music industry during a time of massive upheaval.

Starting as an intern at Universal Music, he recalled with fondness the initial interview where he bluntly exclaimed, “I’m a huge pirate.” It was something the company actually saw as a good thing as it wanted fresh perspective at a time when downloading on platforms like Napster started to become the new norm. Still, Jollet was just the second employee in a fledgling digital department, and not everyone was ready for new consumer habits to upend the status quo.

He spent some of his next seven years at the music label trying to create new business models and mindsets and educate top executives to consider digital as a new opportunity.

“But it was tough” Jollet admitted, noting that the resistance to change is probably what drove him to ultimately leave the company.  

He remembers meetings where he pitched the idea of audio streaming back in the 2005-2006 era. “And the answer that I’d get was ‘no, people want to own things, they want to own CDs, there is no future in streaming,’” he said.

Even though Jollet believes many in the TV ecosystem have learned much from the mistakes of the music industry, he acknowledges coming up against some of same hesitation and fear of change working in the TV or SVOD business.

Going from none to one

In 2010 Jollet co-founded WatchEver, an early SVOD service that brought on-demand delivery to users in Germany at a time when Netflix hadn’t yet arrived.

“It was a fantastic time, probably one of the best in my business career,” he recalled. Starting from scratch, the company built up “huge brand awareness” and became number one in the country as people discovered what subscription on-demand service was.

Still, it took time to educate end users and to convince content providers that they should trust the model. And not every effort hit the mark.

For example, in Germany, prime time movies at the time started at 8:15 pm on all channels after the national news. In launching WatchEver, Jollet described how the company pursued a marketing campaign essentially telling viewers that “8:15 is whenever you want” – in a nod to the on-demand factor.

The problem, he said, is that everyone started using the SVOD product at 8:15. “The purpose of building an SVOD service was to bring this choice and give the freedom to the people to watch whenever they want,” he explained. “But, they were watching the national news, it was ending at 8:15 and then turning on the app to watch a movie.”

This was a good learning for Jollet, as “the brand campaign was actually completely wrong.”

And while it was one of the best times in Jollet’s career, he also considers it one of the most humbling. By 2014 with Netflix’s European expansion was underway, the streaming giant arrived on the scene in Germany and Watchever’s investors felt it was getting too expensive.

“We were super successful, we were dreaming of becoming bigger and bigger…but then Netflix arrived and it changed the entire market,” he recalled. “So from one day to another, you are on top, and then they said ‘the game is over.’”

However, Jollet pulled inspiration from an early mentor who told him you can learn much by failing

His next venture Quazer, founded in 2016, offered a digital TV-like service with 60 curated and thematic channels – and was eventually acquired by Pluto (before its own acquisition by ViacomCBS and later part of Paramount) to help speed expansion in Europe.

There’s a somewhat similar trajectory of Pluto TV, which, with its linear and ad-supported model came to market at a time when the industry was crying the end of pay TV and death of linear. Pluto launched in 2014, on April Fools Day, no less.

“People thought we were fools because when Tom Ryan brought that product to market in the U.S. first, it was built on contrarian principle. It was free in the age of subscription, linear in the age of on-demand, and it was ad-supported where everyone was going way from advertising models,” Jollet said. 

Yes, SVOD has been incredibly successful, he noted, but it’s not the only game in town.  That can be seen clearly with the advent of a whole crop of FAST players now competing in the U.S.– such as Fox’s Tubi, Comcast’s Xumo, and NBCU’s Peacock, as well as The Roku Channel, and smart TV players like Samsung TV Plus, Vizio’s WatchFree and LG Channels. Leading SVOD players Netflix and Disney+ are also moving to ad-supported models with the introduction of plans with ads this year.

Pluto though has seen notable levels of success, including the U.S. where it recently surpassed the 1% threshold for total TV viewing time – and was also the first FAST service to do so, according to Nielsen. As of the third quarter the Pluto TV FAST service counted 72 million monthly active users.

As consumer habits are a continually shifting target, what’s actually important to Jollet is disruption in the market. Even before Pluto became part of Paramount, he spearheaded successful international launches in several markets including Europe. More recently, over the summer Pluto launched in the Nordics in partnership with NENT and Viaplay.

With his recent promotion, Jollet now oversees teams of approximately 200 employees, as he leads Pluto’s expansion outside the U.S. across ad sales, content, distribution, data and operations.

He spoke humbly about being in rooms with people smarter than he is, and the executive – who is an avid soccer (or football as it’s called outside of the U.S.) fan and continues to play on a club team  – considers himself a coach that wants to pull the best out of his team of players while taking a light-handed approach to management.

Corus

For its latest launch in Canada, Pluto is partnering with Corus. The main benefits of taking a partner approach are getting local expertise and content, both from a programming and ad sales perspective, according to Jollet.

“They have all the relationships with the agencies, so you obviously have like a huge win in terms of when you ramp up your market when you have such a fantastic ad rep on your side” while also being able to sell across TV and digital.

Corus also has great knowledge of the Canadian audience, he said helping to scale the business quicker by shortening the phase typically needed to understand the audience.

In Canada Pluto TV is launching with more than 20,000 hours of content and over 110 thematic and single-series channels, including channels entirely in French.

For U.S. content Pluto’s also able to leverage parent Parmount’s large library with brands such as MTV, Nickelodeon and others.                                                                    

Australia is teed up as Pluto’s next market launch.

Food and FAST?

Growing up in France, good cuisine is close to Jollet’s heart (and biggest frustration with Germany as his home base), but he’s not one to follow a recipe, preferring to create. That goes both for when he’s whipping up meals for his family and friends, and his approach to business, where all ideas are welcome and he likes to push the notion of test and learn.

“If you don’t have ideas then you won’t have the next big idea,” Jollet said. “Some of those will become big ones, some of those will fail, and it’s again, something which is part of daily life.”

He said when Pluto TV launches channels, “we never know if they will work, and we kill some of the channels that we created.”

For example, there was a time at Pluto when the team was convinced there was a big future for having quick five-minute recipes on cooking channels. On paper, everyone sitting around the table said “great, people love cooking, love the idea,” he noted.

But as the data came in, it soon became clear that the content wasn’t working for the channel.

“The answer is that the cooking idea was great, but the pure five-minute recipe was not what the people wanted, so we kept the food channels but we changed entirely the programming strategy,” he noted. Instead, Pluto added different formats such as documentaries around food, food from around the world, glimpses at food markets – and as a result watch-time started ticking up.

It’s one of the ways Pluto stays flexible – not necessarily always axing channels that don’t work, but being willing to shift from an initial concept to something entirely new for the live channel.

And while Jollet said he could give an example of 100 times a channel didn’t work, there are many ones that do. That was true in Argentina where the company launched a 24/7 channel in the Spanish-language version of “Big Brother”, which led it to be the most dominant application in the country for three weeks in a row, he said.

Pluto's future

Of course at its core, Pluto is an ad sales business, so while content is the engine, monetization is the destination.

Jollet said he’s confident about Pluto’s ability to deliver, noting last year the company marked a key milestone in reaching $1 billion in ad revenue. Driving monetization, Jollet considers engagement the key metric, one it will continue to increase as it looks to deliver curated channels to users across the globe.

“The beauty of the digital business is that it’s not set in stone, and it keeps changing. So what you do now may be wrong in twelve months time,” he said. “And that’s something which we need to take into account in the way you think, build business cases, build the mindset, build the corporate culture to be successful in the digital business.”

From a business perspective, Jollet’s aspiration is for Pluto to become truly global product. On a more personal level, one wish for Pluto TV?

“We don’t have a musical channel, we should bring that, I love watching musicals,” Jollet said with a smile, harking back to his early days singing in school productions.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Jollet's age as 39, he is 43.