As streaming gets smarter, marketers are using it in new ways.
This will only accelerate as platforms like Roku innovate to help marketers engage viewers across a wide range of environments – including free TV channels, live sports, and native ads on the home screen.
To understand which opportunities our agency and platform partners are most excited about, we asked a bunch of them to share their thoughts on the future. Here, we present their “short takes” on the evolution of ad formats, live events and more.
Like linear TV, streaming offers mass reach. But thanks to CTV’s data-driven precision and novel creative experiences — including interactive and shoppable ads — advertisers don’t have to settle for a one-size-fits-all approach.
Andrea Palmer at Publicis Health Media says that unique creative experiences, when combined with robust audience data, result in ads that are far more personalized and effective.
"The ability to use data to drive more robust versioning and messaging and creativity [is] what I'm excited about," Palmer says.
Not only that, but smarter CTV ad formats that engage audiences before they enter ad-free channels will increase the overall size of the streaming market, according to Francis D’Hondt, SVP at Kinesso.
"These more interactive overlays ... are almost turning CTV into a multi-channel format,” D’Hondt says. “It's exciting because it's just the channel expanding as a whole."
Takeaway: Roku’s vast proprietary data from 90 million streaming households and unique formats allow brands to level up their creativity and precision — through native ads, shoppable ads, Roku City ads and more.
Jockeying over sports rights has led to severe fragmentation, making it hard for fans to find their favorite teams. Roku's Sports Zones help viewers overcome this challenge while also giving brands new ways to align with specific sports or leagues.
These opportunities can even transcend sports and influence other types of live programming, according to WPP Media’s Adam Shlachter. He says it’s still early days for sports and other live events.
“We're seeing a lot of interesting experiments and innovation around sports, and you start to see that bleed into other formats like talk and award shows,” Shlachter says.
Takeaway: As more live content comes to streaming, marketers can use Roku’s platform to align with that content – whether it’s sports, award shows, royal weddings or bands on tour.
Today, 46.4% of all TV viewing time is spent streaming, greater than cable and broadcast combined. For marketers, this tsunami of streaming activity means prioritizing streaming over linear TV only makes sense.
"Boldness is just following the data,” says Megan Jones, Chief Media Officer at Digitas North America. “It's looking for new ways to take advantage of new ad formats, new ways that people are actually consuming the content, but first and foremost, I think just making it a priority in the media mix."
As Kinnesso’s D’Hondt puts it, “I want to see some clients be extremely bold and almost focus on the streaming and CTV side first before thinking of linear.”
With our super-sized scale, Roku is the marketers’ go-to place for reach and impact today—and tomorrow, too.
Contact a Roku rep to see how we can work together and build the future today.
