Dec 13, 2023 In The Office With
Taking Franchises from Screens to Shelves
"The creativity of our internal team and licensing partners never ceases to impress... sometimes products come along that you’d never expect.”
Our In the Office With... series, gives Paramount executives the opportunity to reveal a little bit about who they are, how they lead, and what drives them in the day-to-day.
“The creativity of our internal team and licensing partners never ceases to impress. Every project is exciting when the people you work with are so talented,” says David Chustz, EVP, head of global creative, consumer products, and experiences.
From action figures to fire pits, Chustz leads the creative development for all consumer products across Paramount. He and his team meet with creators as soon as a project is greenlit. It’s their job to ensure the creator’s vision comes to life in the form of a T-shirt, a game, a pizza puzzle…any product that will excite fans.
This holiday season, you can see the results of his work on shelves in retailers across the world, tied to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie™, both of which are now streaming on Paramount+, in addition to many more of Paramount’s hit franchises. With the company on and off since 1995, Chustz has been able to work on properties from TMNT to SpongeBob to Yellowstone and one of his childhood favorites, Star Trek.
Chustz spoke to the Paramount Newsroom recently about his long career at Paramount, the creative process that translates great content to great consumer products, and the importance of One Paramount to the consumer products business.
NB: As the EVP of Global Creative for Consumer Products, what is the goal for you and your team?
DC: My goal is to support the growth of Paramount’s amazing franchises through authentic extensions of those stories and characters into all aspects of fans’ lives. More than ever, we live in a fan-driven culture. Consumers all over the world crave opportunities to engage with their favorite franchises in how they play, what they wear, the experiences they have—even in their workspaces. We want to make sure we’re giving them what they want.
Ours is a global business, so I have teams designing and managing product development around the world. Because of the time it takes to develop, we’re often working two years or more in advance of a content premiere or experience launch. So, my role is to ensure that the team has what they need to creatively support promotion of our franchises to licensing partners and retailers, the development of products across global markets and cultures, and how those products are presented in stores and on shelves. And of course, making sure that our work is an authentic reflection of the characters and story worlds created by our content teams.
NB: How does the creative process work when you’re translating content to consumer products?
DC: Every project is different. There are times that we start working with content creators or development teams before something's greenlit because there's an agreement that the concept of a show or movie might inspire consumer product potential.
The majority of our time is spent on our established hit franchises like PAW Patrol and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. For PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, we were in lock step with Spin Master in the earliest days of the movie’s development. While they lead development of the core toy program, we lead creative for all other licensed products. This has been a 10-year long collaboration that has resulted in a hugely successful CP program for our portfolio.
For something like the new iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Point Grey Pictures’ creative team developed a very fresh, highly-specific new vision for the franchise. [Point Grey, founded by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, produced Mutant Mayhem].
In this case, we worked with the production designer for Mutant Mayhem throughout the entire movie development process to ensure we “mastered” the look and feel of this newly imagined story world. The core of any CP program is the style guide, which takes months to develop in collaboration with content creators. It includes all the design assets partners need to develop products that will be true to the content. This includes both graphic elements reflective of the story world as well as character art, which is one of the things most critical to creators and the CP program. The Mutant Mayhem characters are extremely complex in terms of their design. We take character art provided by the filmmakers and translate that to a variety of formats, including 2D, CG art and physical 3D modeling. We also have to understand the many nuances in how various products and categories are manufactured. And we have to manage this while staying as close to the creator's vision as possible. It's a tremendously close collaboration, both with our content creators and our licensing partners.
We’re seeing all our work come to fruition now for both theatricals as products are on shelves for PAW Patrol and continue to sell strong for TMNT. It’s just really exciting to see all of that work come together and to see everything aligned across the franchises on a global basis. The retail presence is a big statement for both films, and it’s super gratifying when the process goes so well.
NB: What are some of the projects you’ve been most excited about or proud of?
DC: The creativity of our internal team and licensing partners never ceases to impress. Every project is exciting when the people you work with are so talented. And even then, sometimes products come along that you’d never expect. For example, for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, we reviewed a hand-made rug from Nepal.
Yellowstone has led us into all kinds of products we’ve never licensed before. Firepits and cast-iron frying pans are examples. That property lends itself to new categories that some of our other franchises don’t.
We spend a lot of time on action figures and dolls because they tend to be core to many of our consumer products lines. It’s a big entry point for both kids and collectors. We had the TMNT: Mutant Mayhem filmmakers at Playmates Toys a couple of times over the course of the figure development and it was really fun to see the director Jeff Rowe geeking out over the Bebop and Rock Steady figures in the showroom. It’s extremely gratifying to excite the filmmakers after the hours and hours we sometimes spend just to make one action figure. That's probably what's most exciting to see because it says we’ve done our job right.
NB: Tell me a little bit about your career background. What was your first professional role?
DC: Believe it or not, I started as a management consultant but had a bug to do something more creative. I did some acting in New York City for five or six years – just auditioning and performing theater – and I eventually got a temp job working at VH1. I was placed as the assistant to Lauren Zalaznick, who had just taken over VH1 On-Air Promos for then VH1 President John Sykes. I transitioned from assistant to Producer/Director and have stayed in entertainment media ever since.
NB: What made you stay in media?
DC: During my time as a producer, we worked on a lot of image spots, which were creative branding for the channels. Because of this, there was a lot of creative thinking and exploration among the team, coming up with ideas, getting a budget going, and directing, developing motion graphics and producing commercials to promote the channel and its programming. It was a really creative atmosphere and I loved being a part of it.
NB: How has your role evolved from Nickelodeon to ViacomCBS to Paramount?
DC: In some ways, it feels like just yesterday, but so much has happened in the last few years. When I started, I was largely focused on Nickelodeon consumer products in the US, then global CP creative for all of the Viacom brands — MTV, Comedy Central, etc. — and then the consumer products piece of Paramount Pictures came over to us. When the merger happened, CBS was added. We had a moment where we were Viacom, Paramount and CBS. But now, of course, we’re aligned under One Paramount.
NB: What were you most looking forward to once we had all these brands under one roof?
DC: Personally, I've been a Star Trek fan since I was a kid. I was a classic nerd in love with superheroes, fantasy, I mean, everything: Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Batman. I fell in love with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when I was a little bit older. So the opportunity to work on both Star Trek and the Turtles was super exciting to me.
Also, I had felt for a long time, and it's something Pam Kaufman and I talked about a lot in those early days, that we had an opportunity to scale. We had a lot of expertise supporting Nickelodeon — largely Nickelodeon in the US — and we both believed that expertise could extend to support licensing opportunities across the company’s full portfolio of franchises globally, especially as these franchises grow to span multiple demos and platforms.
The power we bring to retail representing the entire portfolio of Paramount versus just one part, made so much more sense. It’s also been exciting for us to have the variety of creative opportunity that comes from working on everything from PAW Patrol to Yellowstone. And to be able to go to the global Licensing Expo and say, “We’re One Paramount” – there’s power in that.
NB: Speaking of Licensing Expo, Paramount was there in June, and we were just at BLE (Brand Licensing Europe) in October. What do you think sets us apart from competitors at these industry events?
DC: This is the first year that we truly went in as One Paramount. The booth, the presentation, and our statement at the Licensing Expo brought that to life in a really impactful way. The way that we're connected internally across all parts of the business in support of massive, incredibly popular, and successful franchises—everywhere from consumer products to retail marketing—was really apparent to our partners. I don't think any competitor is aligned the way we are right now.
SMALL TALK
Q: What was your first job ever?
DC: I worked at a snowball stand that belonged to the brother of one of my father's friends. Why he had a snowball stand, I have no idea. I made and served snowballs under an overpass in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Q: What’s something about you that your employees would be surprised to learn about you?
DC: Maybe not surprising anymore, but I spent half my childhood pretending I was Captain Kirk.
Q: Have you ever had a nickname?
DC: Chust-y (pronounced Shoots-y).
Q: What are you currently obsessed with?
DC: I move fairly quickly from one obsession to another – I’ve been a die-hard fan of a lot of things since I was a comics-obsessed kid. Working on the new TMNT movie has re-ignited my obsession with the Turtles. We have a number of TMNT games coming out that I can’t wait to play.
Q: What’s the worst advice you’ve received?
DC: “Try to be more like so-and-so.” We often admire other people who have skills or strengths that are different from our own. Over time, I’ve had people point to those people as examples of how I should act in order to be more successful. It never works. You need to develop your own unique strengths and make them your superpower.
