Today we’re going to talk about how brands can use streaming and shoppable TV to engage and build valuable customer relationships.
While Roku is mostly known as the most popular streaming platform in the US, Canada, and Mexico reaching over 83 million households, it’s also a strategic advertising destination for some of the biggest brands from Disney to McDonald’s. To talk about all of this as well as some recent announcements, I’d like to welcome Peter Hamilton, Senior Director of Ad Innovation, Roku.
Peter Hamilton is an experienced technology executive as well as an active advisor and investor in tech startups with passionate founders. He joined Roku in 2021 as the Head of Television Commerce. Today, he is the Senior Director of Ad Innovation at Roku, where his teams build all consumer-facing ad experiences on Roku.
Resources
Roku website: https://www.roku.com/
Roku Ads Manager: https://advertising.roku.com/solutions/advertise/ads-manager
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
Welcome to Season 6 of The Agile Brand, where we discuss marketing technology and customer experience trends, insights, and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data, and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer-focused, and sustainable. This is what makes an Agile brand. I’m your host, Greg Kihlstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on Martech, Marketing Operations, and CX, bestselling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com. Now let’s get on to the show. Today we’re going to talk about how brands can use streaming and shoppable TV to engage and build valuable customer relationships. While Roku is mostly known as the most popular streaming platform in the US, Canada, and Mexico, reaching over 83 million households, it’s also a strategic advertising destination for some of the biggest brands, from Disney to McDonald’s. To talk about all of this, as well as some recent announcements, I’d like to welcome Peter Hamilton, Senior Director of Ad Innovation at Roku. Peter, welcome to the show.
Peter Hamilton: Hey, hi, Greg. Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to talk today.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely, definitely. And looking forward to hearing a bit about the new announcements as well. But before we get started, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Roku?
Peter Hamilton: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m the head of ad innovation at Roku. Before Roku, I was the CEO of a company called Tune. And we focused on measurement of performance in the mobile landscape. And we started that when it was still Very, very early days, mobile advertising wasn’t really a thing back then. And over the coming decade, we saw this create an entire economy for advertising and a place where marketers were able to find really fantastic, always on, the evergreen types of campaigns that would drive growth for their businesses. And after selling my company and taking some time off, I really just became fascinated with streaming. I believe it’s sort of the next great frontier for marketers to explore. The power of top of the funnel advertising and messaging and video on the largest screen in the home is second to none. But with streaming, now this is more like the targeted digital age that we’ve come to expect from mobile. And so yeah, I joined Roku about three years ago now, initially to start our first efforts in commerce integrations and performance. And then over time that role has expanded to lots of other units and managing across product and go to market for Roku’s native advertising and self service access.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. Well, and one other thing, you know, a lot of people listening are I’m sure familiar with Roku already, as it is the most popular streaming platform in the US. But for those that may still not be as familiar, can you give a little background on its origins as a way for brands to reach audiences, including the iconic screensaver?
Peter Hamilton: Sure. I get this question all the time because I still think a lot of folks don’t really know what Roku exactly is. Is it TV? Is it a puck or a dongle? Is it a content maker? Is it an advertising platform? And really at the core, Roku is an operating system. And it is the most used operating system, especially in the United States. are in half of American households. And that operating system finds its way into those households, yes, through dongles and pucks and things that you plug into your dumb TV to make it smart, but also through the TV itself. About a third of televisions sold in the United States are Roku-enabled televisions, working with our OEM partners like TCL and Hisense. And then Roku is also sort of launching our own manufactured TVs, most recently with our Pro Series TV that competes in a little bit of the higher end market. And yeah, so it’s really the OS at the most fundamental level. But being the OS also means that we have the opportunity to be that lead in to television. When you turn on your TV and you enter the Roku home screen, that’s the place where you’re deciding on what you’re going to watch next. So the discovery experiences that we create, the Roku channel where we have thousands and thousands of titles that you can browse and watch our own content that we generate. Of course, we’re promoting all the other apps. and content providers on Roku. And it really is the central place for determining, you know, what do I what am I going to watch today and has an opportunity for advertisers to be able to take part in that. And so, you know, a big part of our business, of course, is advertising. And we do that both in native experiences on the home screen. You’ll see ads for the latest shows and entertainment apps and that sort of thing. You’ll also see brands in that space, especially those that are doing content collaborations and sponsorships and connection to content and entertainment experiences. And then also, of course, in-stream video advertising. So as you’re watching ad-supported TV, those 15 and 30-second ads, and sometimes longer, are ad units that we provide. And that’s a very large and very fast-growing part of our business. Again, because you’re not just putting your ad into a break in a specific show, you’re actually focused more on who is this viewer and what have their viewing habits look like? And what has their interaction looked like with my brand in the past? And how do I make sure I’m targeting the right kind of viewer with that ad experience versus just who might be watching this particular show at this particular time?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. And I think that’s that’s a good segue here, because I do you know, before we jump into some of the new stuff and, you know, definitely want to want to talk through that as well. I wanted to get some just some general context around streaming and shopping on streaming TV. So I know you touched on it a little bit just there, but can you give us, you know, the current state of, you know, how are brands currently advertising on streaming TV? And you know, what’s what’s the current state of things?
Peter Hamilton: Well, first of all, you know, brands are, you know, especially larger brands that have been buying it linear for a very long time are still in the middle of shifting those dollars towards streaming. You know, streaming has surpassed total viewership to lean linear only in the last couple of years. And the still there are more dollars in linear than there are in streaming. But that shift is continuing to happen and it’s happening, you know, quite quickly. And so brands are thinking about what is different about this medium? What does it mean to focus on the user even more so than context always? What are the opportunities to take part in the lead in for television? So can I be a part of the discovery experience? Can I make sure that I’m still able to find outsized reach on streaming versus what the kind of buying that I did in linear? And so that’s very, very important. As it relates to shoppable or commerce-oriented experiences on television, You know, this has been a dream for TV for more than more than two decades, or I guess even three. And it’s something that, you know, has a lot more opportunity when there is an operating system at the heart of it where we can invoke native experiences onto the television and we can control those experiences. And those can be hooked up through APIs to, you know, commerce enablement and all that sort of thing. And so we’re making a lot of advancements in that area. But at the same time, we have to realize what is this medium? You know, it is still a lean to back experience. Generally, viewers are, you know, sitting back, wanting to be entertained, watching content. In some cases, they might be in the mood for shopping and they’re looking for content that might be associated with that. But in a lot of cases, they’re just looking to be entertained. And so in that kind of context, how do we make something that is attractive to viewers, that lets them feel like they’re in control, that lets them feel like they have options and opportunity. And so it’s unlikely that it’s going to have the same sort of DR types of response that you’re going to have when you have a phone in front of your face and you’re you know, tapping along and going directly to make a purchase right in that moment. It has all the power of, you know, the largest screen in the home, which is all that top-of-funnel magic that comes with messaging. But when you add these interactive and shoppable components, you start to communicate to viewers that there’s something you can do now. There’s a functionality, there’s an experience that you can explore on your television set, and that has users really intrigued. That has them leaning in a little bit more and trying to see what’s behind the curtain with this interactive thing that I might be able to take part in. And that’s what I hope, you know, at least over the next couple of years, that this part of the experience is what drives consideration in the funnel. So television sort of working its way downward in the funnel, driving not just, you know, top of mind or awareness or brand recall, but also getting consumers into the buying mode and getting them to think about, OK, you know, what is this product? And do I am I really interested? And do I want to tap on this thing to learn a little bit more? And whether I make the purchase like right in this moment or over the next week, maybe when I walk into a Walmart store. Right, right. This is having consideration impact. That’s very, very valuable to to large scale brands.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, and I would say that is a shift in the way that marketers think about the funnel and traditional TV, linear advertising, as you’re saying, right? I mean, it’s causing a shift in thinking already, right?
Peter Hamilton: Yeah, it’s sort of bringing to the table sort of the best of both worlds from both TV and also, you know, the experiences of search and social. And it’s sort of, you know, is somewhere in the middle, right? It’s providing a different kind of unique and distinct value. And what we’ve seen With our shoppable experiences is that your overall sales lift and conversion goes up when you provide these kinds of engaging opportunities for consumers to interact versus when you’re just running a brand video. And that shouldn’t be surprising. The fact that you get some sort of intent, you get a little bit more information about what the viewer is excited about, and they spend a little more time with the brand. I’m not sure that most of the people listening to this have even seen all the capabilities that we have, but I can describe them really quickly. You know, first off, when you’re watching one of these in-stream video ads and you see this overlay come out over top, we’re giving opportunity for a viewer to press OK on the remote to explore more. maybe the call to actions to shop now or sign up or download an app. And then from there, we have various types of journeys for the funnel. So maybe we want to land them on a product consideration page that helps them explore the product and see images of a product. And then maybe they want to make a purchase right then and there. And if that’s the case, we’ve done integrations with Shopify and with Walmart on the backend so that, you know, we preload all of the viewers information on the screen so they can just hit place order and the order just happens magically in the backend and they’ll receive it in the mail in the next couple of days. And so that’s like one experience. Another experience is, you know, tapping on that commercial and then allowing Roku to send me a text for this offer or this product or this app to download. And, you know, my phone number is pre-populated in there based on my account. I can change the number, et cetera. But simply just hit send text and you receive a text message and that allows you to tap through. So those are a couple of examples of these things that happen on screen. And by and large, we just find that these kinds of interactive experiences work far, far better than the slapping a QR code in the video or slapping a QR code on the page. on the order of magnitude of, you know, 10 to 20 times more effective. Wow, wow. And so, you know, we really encourage folks to lean into, you know, these kinds of interactive capabilities that, you know, the operating system can provide.
Greg Kihlstrom: You’ve made an announcement pretty recently about Roku Ads Manager. Why don’t we jump to the big news here and can you tell us a little bit about it?
Peter Hamilton: Absolutely. I am absolutely over the moon excited about this announcement. This has been a long time coming. This product is called Roku Ads Manager and it’s called that for a reason and it sounds familiar probably to most marketers. You’re familiar with your ads manager on things like Lekmeta and TikTok and other places, this should be a familiar buying experience. So you log into it just like you would any other type of ads manager. Anybody can sign up. And when you sign up, you can load up a credit card, you can upload a creative, and you can start running campaigns on television. So it really is as simple as that. It really aims to democratize buying CTV so that anyone can do it. There’s no minimum spins required or anything like that. It is a little bit different than what we’ve seen from some other players in the market in terms of self-service. We do aim to solve the problems and meet the needs of more growth and performance-oriented advertisers. So when it comes to targeting and it comes to measurement and creative tools and controls, this is all very much focused on making this an always on evergreen style buying interface. And so, you know, in doing so, that means we are just rapidly iterating on this product all the time. We’ve been in beta for the past year and just been working with hundreds of advertisers who have signed up directly or that we’ve invited to the platform. Just getting as much feedback as we possibly can, listening to the needs of performance oriented advertisers and those that are really trying to develop CTV into a permanent growth channel. And I’m just so, so proud of what we’ve been able to put together in this product. And we announced that it is generally available on the 18th. of September. So we are we are live to the world. We want everyone to know about this new platform, to know that this is a new way to access Roku media and media from our partners. And there’s there’s literally no barrier to get in and launch a test.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice. Well, congrats on that. And I mean, yeah, definitely, definitely exciting. And can’t wait to check it out myself. So what do you think this direct access, you know, self service, you know, what are you what are you hoping that this means for for marketers that want to reach these audiences?
Peter Hamilton: Well, I think You know, there’s lots of different ways to buy CTV, you know, third-party programmatic. We have direct IOs that we sell through Roku. But this, you know, self-service kind of experience has been lackluster, I think, for the market. Either the cost efficiency just hasn’t been there for folks, or it was so simple that there aren’t enough features for performance marketers to really take it seriously. And so that’s what we’re aiming to do, is really step it up a notch, really think about this thing as a high-powered, really scalable system that is still simple and familiar and easy to buy along. And, you know, that’s not that’s not easy to do. You know, we had to build our own framework for this. We had to develop everything from the ground up ourselves here and, you know, build an architecture that was going to be extremely scalable for that kind of iteration. But I think what marketers will probably be most impressed by is the efficiency. Yeah. You know, this direct access to Roku media means that there are not additional fees tacked on in any way. It’s all direct buying. You’re going to see some of the best cost efficiency out there, you know, both on Roku owned and operated media, as well as on the media of our publishing partners, which are lots of the other AVOD apps that you’ll find on a Roku device. And yeah, I think this is this is sort of the next great hope for performance marketers that are trying to, you know, they’ve sort of they’ve done what they can do with search and social. They’ve built those into very effective, ongoing channels, and they’re looking for more. You know, they need more channel support and They want to find channels that can both directly perform and provide sales and drive revenue, but also that will give lift and value to their overall marketing mix, which television has the promise to do.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I’m sure a lot of, a lot of people out there are going to want to check this out and, and just start wrapping their heads around what this means as far as their overall approach, you know, what would your recommendation be? You know, how should brands, whether they’re doing a lot of advertising, which many, many probably are right now on, on linear, or maybe someone on streaming already, or they’re just kind of dipping their toes on, you know, what should they start thinking about differently?
Peter Hamilton: You know, This is not search and social. So just just sort of tossing up creative and things that are that were just built for other channels. You know, maybe a good way to start and a good way to start testing. But if you want to be a leader in this category and you want to really explore the total opportunity that CTV has to provide, you should be thinking about the medium. You should be thinking about the audience. You should be thinking about their behavior in the room. That’s different than when the phone is in front of their face. And how are you going to alter your campaign to have the biggest amount of impact that it possibly can in that new environment? So really thinking about that is important. Also that, you know, if you’re coming from linear, maybe if you’re buying in that world mostly, this is targeted, like this is focused on the viewer, regardless of what show they might be watching right in this moment. And you want to be able to pinpoint that audience in the best way possible. And you want to be able to think about OK, well, what kind of frequency is going to matter? Do I need to hit these viewers with more than one type of message? How am I optimizing against this? In the Ads Manager, we can optimize on things like conversions and app installs and other things like that. And that optimization is going to be critical for you to get there. And then maybe lastly, I’d just say, test, test, test. You know, your first TikTok campaign probably wasn’t your best performing. This is not a one and done type situation. You’re developing a new channel and a new operation within your team. And so, you know, continuously testing and iterating and improving and testing creatives against themselves and audiences against those and optimizing all of those. just like any other channel, you know, I know it’s TV, but it’s still digital. So, so you can take that all that acumen for testing that you’ve had in the digital world and bring it to CTV.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, that was, you know, kind of the first thing that came to mind for me was, you know, with the ability to have that direct hands on control also means maybe quicker ability to test and iterate and even create more variations to do, you know, multivariate and stuff. So I mean that definitely seems like, not that you can’t do it with some other ways, but it just seems like that direct access makes it a lot easier and maybe quicker feedback and stuff. Would you say that’s true?
Peter Hamilton: Yeah, I mean, that kind of testing is just gonna be more native to what we’re building with the ads manager than what you might have found in CTV in the past.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So let’s look out maybe a few months or even a few years here. What’s the future of shoppable TV? Where do you see things heading and how do consumers stand to benefit?
Peter Hamilton: Sure, well, one thing I left out about the ads manager is that when you’re creating a campaign, you actually can add an interactive overlay like the one I described before on your video ad and you can do that self-service and we don’t charge anything for it. Nice, nice. And so you can sort of make adjustments to this overlay and change the colors and CTAs and things like that on it. And then the primary path that we’re supporting right now is the viewer pressing OK and then sending themselves a text. And so you can also write your own text message and send the viewer to a very specific link, maybe for an offer or a product or to download an app. And this is the first time that has been made available in a self-service product for CTV. And we can do that because, you know, we are the native operating system that invokes this. And so I’m just absolutely fired up to see how marketers are going to use that. I think we’re going to learn a lot from marketers that are utilizing this in really inventive ways and thinking about how to build this into their campaigns and drive the most interactivity they possibly can. So I think over the next year, by providing these things on a self-service basis, we’re going to see marketers crack the code, right? We’re going to see them start to teach the platforms how it is that you can be most effective with interactivity and shopability in television. From there, you can expect us to be launching more capabilities. And maybe this hints at how I think about the future, that there will be more on-device purchasing and shopping. As it turns out, viewers don’t really like to connect their experiences from the big screen to the phone. That may be counterintuitive because so many people are sitting there on the couch also with their phone scrolling maybe social media, but they want their social media experience to be separate from what’s happening in the living room and what’s being shared within the household or the family. And they’d really rather pick up the remote and do something on the TV and keep their spot on their phone. And so you’re going to see more and more user behavior move toward that. And all kinds of capabilities come out of that as you integrate with commerce providers. You know, I can hint that, you know, we’ve done integrations like this with, with Walmart and Shopify, obviously the DTC Shopify advertiser makes a lot of sense for ads manager in general and, uh, add some of these kinds of components to it. And that could be really, really exciting. both for making a purchase now or adding to your cart or saving an item that you’re interested in or finding a way in the CTV experience for people to be able to go back to things that they saw before. You know, think of it like the hearted page within social that you can go back and see all the things that you hearted so you can go buy that thing now that you have been thinking about. You know, all of those kinds of things are going to be happening more natively and they’re going to be happening more directly on the television itself.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and that definitely has some impacts on the buyer’s journey as well. So yeah, definitely looking forward to seeing what’s to come here. Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining the show today. One last question before we wrap up here. You’ve given a lot of great insights and ideas already. For those that want to get started with shoppable TV and ads manager, what’s your advice? What’s the best next step for them?
Peter Hamilton: Well, the great thing is that we’ve made all of that really simple. Just go to ads.roku.com, sign up, get going. The one thing that you need to focus on first is creative, creative, creative. What are you going to run on television? And I recommend don’t spend a lot of money out the gate. You really want to test in and learn about what kinds of creative are working well for you and your particular offer or your particular product and strategy. I highly recommend folks work with influencers that have been creating awesome videos and creative for your brand already. They come off as authentic. They come off as very connected to the viewer. They’re probably breaking the fourth wall, speaking into the living room. So I highly recommend folks lean into that. But in general, test into creative. And as you start to find the paths that work really well for you, then sure, you can up your budgets. But don’t think that CTV has to be this really high budget, very expensive, glossy type of creative. We’re actually finding that viewers prefer a much more authentic experience and something that they can relate to. So keep that in mind as you’re building that creative. That’s really the only thing you got to do is make the right creative to meet the right audience.
Greg Kihlstrom: Wonderful. Well, again, I’d like to thank Peter Hamilton, senior director of ad innovation at Roku for joining the show. You can learn more about Peter and Roku and Roku ads manager by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand, brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.GregKihlstrom.com. That’s G-R-E-G-K-I-H-L-S-T-R-O-M.com. While you’re there, check out my series of best-selling Agile Brand Guides, covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics, or you can search for Greg Kihlstrom on Amazon. The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina-owned, strategy-driven, creatively-fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging, and informative content. Until next time, stay agile.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
