Roku wants advertisers to take advantage of the scale of its platform as they navigate the shift from linear to streaming.
“A lot of brands are still rolling over their linear TV strategy into streaming,” Julian Mintz, head of U.S. brand sales at Roku, told Broadcasting+Cable and Next TV. “And the truth is in the streaming space, with all of the fragmentation that exists now and new channels popping up, if you just roll your linear strategy over there’s a very good chance that as a brand you’re going to get lost.”
Roku will make its pitch to advertisers on May 2, during next week’s NewFronts. “Our goal this year, put very simply, is to make brands completely unmissable in the streaming era,” Mintz said.
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Streaming now has more reach among adults 18-49 than broadcast or cable, said Mintz, pointing to data from Nielsen.
That means marketers should change how they use streaming. While the platform was once used for its ability to target specific viewers, including cord-cutters, Roku, with its 70 million monthly users, says it now has the kind of fast reach that was always the bedrock of television advertising.
With a platform that carries a huge share of streaming ads, “we think we’re uniquely qualified to really make marketers unmissable In this era,” Mintz said. “We are able to drive more reach and more scale than any individual channel can do alone.”
Roku last week announced its Primetime Reach Guarantee program, which creates a package of commercials that will run in traditional primetime on a collection of streaming channels, including The Roku Channel. Roku guarantees the package will outdeliver a spot on any of the top-five cable networks in primetime, or the marketer gets its money back.
“We’re really able to offer the best of TV and the best of digital all at once,” Mintz said.
Unlike traditional TV, where a marketer must hope a viewer turns on the right channel at the right time to see its ad, streaming lets marketers reach viewers at all points during their TV viewing experience — even during the 11 minutes on average it takes a Roku viewer to find what they want to watch.
“That content-discovery experience can be a moment where a brand can provide a ton of value back to the user,” Mintz said.
A growing number of Roku’s ads are interactive. Roku sees interactivity as “a way to shorten the funnel,” or the journey a viewer takes from turning on the TV to buying a product, he said.
“Marketers want to reach those users quickly and with precision in a highly measurable way,” Mintz said. ”And they want to sell their products with as little friction as possible. We’re going to give them more of that this year.”
Last year, Roku viewers were able to buy directly from Walmart using their remote controls while watching TV. Roku is also doing an e-commerce program with Wendy’s and DoorDash.
Wendy’s found that almost immediately, viewers were increasing their order size and that the largest increase came from either new or lapsed Wendy’s customers, Mintz said.
Roku will also be introducing new data partners and new programming at its presentation.
“We're really excited at this upfront to unlock new experiences with big impact that have the best data, best technology and best measurement in TV all by just pressing OK on their remote,” Mintz said.
