Lindsay Pullins, Roku’s director of ad revenue strategy partnerships, believes that retail media will shape the future of advertising. Retail media enables brands to reach customers directly, influencing purchase decisions and driving sales. Seemingly every month, we’re seeing a new retail media network emerge, and some estimate that revenue in this category will overtake linear TV by 2025.¹
“Retail media will just be the way we transact,” says Pullins. And retail media becomes even more powerful with TV streaming. We spoke with Pullins to hear why retail media works, the latest on Roku’s retail media road map, and how TV streaming can supercharge retail media.
Retail has been at the core of most of my career. I spent over 6 years at Empower Media Marketing, creating and leading their agency trading desk. I worked for a number of major retailers and CPG companies, gaining deep experience into the fast-paced dynamics of all things retail. Retailers are constantly evaluating and reevaluating performance to drive sales, foot traffic, reach, and many other KPIs, and it was my job to help them understand how media can drive business outcomes.
After my agency career, I took the leap to 84.51˚, a wholly owned subsidary of the Kroger Company, to lead their offsite retail media business strategy, as director of product strategy and innovation for Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM). There, I continued my passion for retail, while creating and growing new streams of revenue for Kroger through partnerships. I wore many hats in my role at KPM, overseeing media activation teams, product strategy teams, and partnerships. One of the partnerships I was really proud of was our partnership with Roku. KPM and Roku were early in leading the streaming and retail media charge, giving CPG advertisers a great understanding of how their TV streaming buys impacted sales online and in-store at Kroger.
At the basic level, it comes down to first-party data. Retailers have deterministic data on customer shopping habits and purchases, and lots of it. That data has grown significantly over the past decade or more, and as consumers shifted their shopping behaviors online, retailers began capturing search and purchase data, and pairing that behavior to in-store loyalty programs. It created a trail of valuable consumer data points for the retailers and their suppliers. Ultimately, this has enabled advertisers to better understand their customers and as a result allows them to deliver more personalized and relevant advertising on retailers websites and across the media ecosystem to influence the next shopping trip.
As the media ecosystem continues to grow in fragmentation and marketers are feeling new pressures to prove how their media investment is driving business performance, retailers and retail media partners with strong first party data are best poised to help marketers and advertisers measure their investments.
More media investment has shifted into retail media. Estimates are showing over $68 billion in retail media spending by 2025.² I think what’s most interesting is we are now starting to see traditional upper-funnel or reach-awareness media channel adoption in retail media, which is a strong indicator that retail media adopters are seeking new accountability across all channels.
Retailers can provide insight into how media and marketing campaigns are driving sales and help brands improve messaging, product mix, creative, and even their supply chains.
Advertisers are starting to see the benefits, but there's still a lot of ongoing work to fully measure and evaluate each partner, channel, or media activation against these new retail media proof-points and the long-standing media we’ve been working with for decades. The good news, is that marketers don’t have to settle for one or the other. For example, marketers can still achieve their reach and awareness goals, while also seeing how that investment is driving business outcomes.
Advertisers can partner with a TV streaming platform and retail media companies that help acheive reach and awareness goals, while providing multi-layered insights into how it’s also driving business results. At Roku, we partner with retail media companies that are willing to go beyond measuring return on ad spend for a TV streaming campaign. We work with partners and advertisers to understand different audience behaviors. We’re able to combine first-party data with a retailer’s first-party data, so our advertisers can better understand if a campaign brought in new or lapsed users, grew category share, changed search behavior, and much more.
At Roku, we’ve seen the power of retail media first-hand through our close partnership with KPM. Brands like Neutrogena and Home Chef have combined KPM data and Roku streaming ads to reach customers and drive sales.
Our partnership with Instacart provides full-funnel solutions to marketers that increase accountability in TV streaming. Now, advertisers can access even more e-commerce data from grocers, drug stores, and retailers offering apparel, spirits, beauty, home and office, and pet care products. In a pilot with a personal care brand, 60% of those who purchased the brand after seeing its campaign on the Roku platform were new to the brand. Also, those who were exposed to a beverage brand’s Roku campaign and were new purchasers of the brand had a 70% higher repeat rate than the average new-to-the-beverage-brand buyer on Instacart.³
We recently launched Commerce+ Partners, which unlocks first-party data and closed-loop measurement for advertisers. It's focused on what is more traditionally a full-funnel approach, where our retail partners give us access to their first-party data to help our joint advertisers better assess how their TV streaming campaign is driving business outcomes.
TV advertising historically has been very focused on reach and awareness goals, and those always will exist. But we're giving our advertisers a little something extra—or I'd say, a lot extra—in helping them understand how Roku is driving business outcomes.
Our product roadmap is always evolving. For Commerce+, we're very specific in who we want to partner with and making sure that there is differentiation among the partners we give our advertisers access to. At Roku, we’re focused on partnering with companies who have strong first party data, and believe in making TV streaming more accountable. We’re also focused on partners who offer something truly differentiated to our advertising clients.
Ted Lasso. It's a highlight of the week. It's just always so uplifting, although this season is a little darker but still great. Catching up on Yellowjackets, and just started The Diplomat.
Learn more about Roku’s Commerce+ partners, plus all new offerings for brands announced at our 2023 NewFront here.
³ Based on results of pilot campaigns measured between January and December 2022. Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes.