Patrizio “Pato” Spagnoletto is the first to admit that 2022 hasn’t exactly been an easy one for streaming.

“We’re operating in an industry that is literally changing in front of our eyes,” said the global CMO of Warner Bros. Discovery streaming. “A world where it was all about streaming, and it was really simple, and it was just about subscriber growth at any cost—it turns out that is not a sustainable business model.”

Spagnoletto, a former Hulu marketing exec who jumped to Discovery’s streaming business in 2021, hasn’t just been weathering the streaming storm—he and his team are also navigating the growing pains that have come with the megamerger between WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc.

Despite it, the team has notched successes like the HBO hits House of the Dragon and season two of The White Lotus. Now, Spagnoletto is hurtling toward another huge project on the horizon: a brand-new streaming service combining HBO Max and Discovery+ under one roof.

Marketing Brew spoke with Spagnoletto about the marketing wins and challenges of 2022 and what’s next on his priority list.

Read our conversation here.—KS

When covering the streaming industry, there’s rarely a dull day. And 2022 was, like the past several years, full of momentous, meaningful, and sometimes even jaw-dropping industry developments.

We thought back on the last 12 months and brought together six of the biggest streaming developments of the year.

ViacomCBS’s big rebrand

What’s in a name? In the case of ViacomCBS, lingering evidence of a prior megamerger. The company scrapped it in February and rebranded itself as Paramount Global.

Choosing Paramount as the company name was a signal to investors that its priority is streaming entertainment, anchored by Paramount+, which last reported 46 million global subscribers.

CNN+’s failure to launch

Well, that was quick.

There was a lot of hype around CNN+, a subscription streaming service for the news-watching set and an attempt to demonstrate that cable news could adapt in the streaming world. But it hardly had a chance: The service, which debuted at the end of March, shut down after five weeks, giving us Quibi flashbacks.

The WarnerMedia-Discovery merger closes

WarnerMedia and Discovery Inc. officially completed their megamerger in April, bringing entertainment assets from Succession to Say Yes to the Dress under one corporate roof. Like many media moves of the past several years, the deal was designed to give the new company, in this case Warner Bros. Discovery (or WBD), more scale and resources to hopefully better compete in the streaming wars. Even so, it has come with layoffs and cost-cutting measures.

Coming up next for the company: A combined streaming service slated to debut in 2023 that will merge content from platforms like HBO Max and Discovery+ into the same service. Fingers crossed they don’t actually name it “Max.”

Click here to read about more moments that defined streaming this year.—KS

We spent the final weeks of 2022 reflecting on some of this year’s biggest marketing trends. Read our stories below or check them out here.

After years of nostalgia-laden media, a shift might be coming

Have we seen the peak of a branded Web3?

Overlooked and overhyped: Our 2022 reader survey results

What’s the future of shock-value marketing?

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Paint a picture: Working with a graphic designer? These seven tips can help facilitate better collaboration.

Privacy, please: California’s new privacy law goes into effect on January 1. Get a quick primer on it here.

Bigger isn’t better: Learn about micro-influencers and how brands might benefit from working with them.

Here are some of our favorite Marketing Brew stories from the past year.

• The reason why sports streams have advertising gaps, explained
• How podcast networks are making their own rules for political advertising
• How CMOs are thinking about new privacy restrictions
• Why the benefits of samples could outweigh the costs for DTCs

Stat: Clients of Belardi Wong, a DTC marketing agency, have “cut their Meta budgets by an overall average of 20%” since last holiday season, its president, Polly Wong, told Ad Age.

Quote: “I don’t know if restaurant bathrooms will ever be the reason you go to a restaurant, and they probably shouldn’t be…But I think the bathroom can and should and will be one of the reasons why you love going to this restaurant.”—Eric Sze, an owner of Wenwen, a restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to the New York Times about the restaurant’s bathroom, which has a disco ball, strobe lights, and plays pop music

Read: “The Food Post Is Dead. Long Live the Food Post” (Eater London)

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Ad spend will grow next year, though slower than initially expected
• A conversation with Sweetgreen’s chief brand officer
• The best and worst ads of 2022, according to industry creatives