Roku had the ad space, now it has the ability to fill them.
It is 10 months since the TV platform launched Roku Brand, Studio, a team helping produce new creative ad formats and programming tailored to the device.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Roku’s Rachel Helfman explains how it is going.
New-screen content
“It was built to go beyond the 30-second (ad) spot,” Helfman says.
The company launched Brand Studio, taking a number of branded-content creators from Funny Or Die Branded Entertainment.
The reason – to create brand experiences to fill Roku’s inventory.
Amongst the newest such experiences is what Helfman calls “a home screen-native banner” that can be turned “into a branded experience with curated content”.
Creative canvas
“Some of the creative that we’ve done to date really encompasses the unique ability to look at streaming insights and behavioural insights to produce creative that we know will resonate with the audience,” Helfman says.
To that end, she is leveraging a new feature, Roku Recommends, framing brand content as part of the discovery experience.
“We had an insight that streamers were having a hard time choosing what they wanted to watch,” Helfman says. “So why not take that worry away and be able to actually recommend to streamers what they should be tuning into this week?”
Primed with such features, she says the Roku system can now show ads “immediately” when turned on.
Growing footprint
Roku’s ad footprint is growing. In November, the company reported quarterly platform revenue up 82% year-over-year – a combined result of growth in both content monetisation and ad sales.
Helfman says the company’s ad offering includes:
- Home Screen banners
- Ad pods in Roku Originals
- Video ad targeting with inventory from both partners and Roku Channel
But, for Helfman, just like her customers, the sales effort continues.
“We are having a lot of meetings with our clients directly, their marketing and creative teams, as well as our agency partners to educate the community,” she says.
“We have the ability to build branded content, to build brand assets for you to run on our platform on the audience you’re trying to target or come up with a holistic strategy on how media spend should be allocated based on our client’s KPIs or areas that they would like to appear on the platform.”
You are watching “Advertising Transformation: What’s Next for Converged TV and Video,” a Beet.TV Virtual Leadership Summit presented by Mediaocean. For more videos, please visit this page.
