Roku is one of the top sellers of connected TV advertising.
The company would like to become the main way the industry buys CTV – not just on Rokus.
“We are a publisher and a platform,” Miles Fisher Sr. Director, Head of Growth & Platform Sales told me during a recent episode of my Next in Media podcast, which is being distributed in partnership with Beet.TV.
Roku manages its own demand side platform, the result on the acquisition of Dataxu back in 2019.
That technology has primarily been used when advertisers wanted to purchase ad inventory on Rokus – either within the company’s own shows or apps owned by other media companies.
But increasingly the vision, per Fisher, is to have marketers use Roku’s tech (OneView) to manage all of their CTV ad buying. That strategy is not unlike one that Google has deployed on the Web for years, but will surely open Roku up to potential conflicts and walled garden labels. There are a long list of companies that have tried to build tools for the industry while also competing in ad sales – and have struggled to gain traction.
I asked Fisher about some of these potential questions.
“We think of this is the best place to buy all of connected television,” he said. “The reality is, you don’t only have to buy Roku media through our DSP….Our best partners are looking at their entire connected TV buy holistically and also their linear buys.”
That’s because Roku is also able to track what viewers are watching collectively on their devices thanks to ACR data that Fisher says touches one half of all smart TVs ad impressions That gives Roku that “bridge from linear to streaming.”
“The reason that OneView is such a superior platform is our data assets.”
Of course, other DSPs – thing The Trade Desk and yes Google, will have something to say about this. We’ll see how it all plays out.
The video on this page is a short excerpt. Listen to the full interview with Fisher on Next in Media here on Spotify or here on Apple Podcasts. Next in Media is produced in partnership with Beet.TV, presented by MiQ.
