If over-the-top TV providers want to command a bigger share of the US TV advertising pie, they are going to need to prove their effectiveness to advertisers.
That is what Roku is endeavoring to do, by launching a new Measurement Partner Program.
The scheme involves a number of aspects like audience demographics, brand awareness, store visits, website visits and sales increases being measured by bona fide companies, namely 11 of them – Nielsen, comScore, ResearchNow, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Acxiom, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, Kantar, Placed, Factual, and Polk.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Roku director of ad programming and research Dan Robbins explains why Roku has launched the program.
“The whole real goal of this is to make it easy for brands to say, ‘This is what my key KPI is or this is what I’m trying to get out of OTT advertising and bringing transparent third party measurement that helps meet those needs’,” Robbins says.
“As the largest streaming platform, we have registration data about who our households are, we know what they’re viewing. We’re able to directly integrate with these measurement partners.”
Roku’s position in the expanding OTT ad horizon is growing. Earlier this year, the company, which makes devices through which content companies make streaming content available to the TV, launched an OTT marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.
Roughly half of the company’s revenue now comes from “platform”, including ad sales, no longer just from sales of sticks and gadgets.
The new Measurement Partner Program is available to both advertisers and content publishers who want to testify the size of their audience.
But Roku already knows the size of its audience. “Our mission is to be the operating system of television – we now have about 22 million active accounts,” Robbins tells Beet.TV.
Robbins reveals one early insight proved by the program. The Jack In The Box fast-food chain worked with Placed, which uses geo-location to prove real-world footfall prompted by ad exposure, and found that its Roku ad campaign drove more than 160,000 store visits.
