In this video interview with Beet.TV, Dan Robbins, VP of ad marketing and partnerships at streaming TV platform Roku, says that key audience has made a great migration.

And that poses challenges – but also opportunities – for how to reach them.

Chasing viewers

NEW: @Roku to acquire @Nielsen's advanced TV advertising biz
— About 100 Nielsen employees moving over to Roku
— Deal gives Roku access to the technology to scale digital TV ads

Interviews with execs from both companies in full story from @axios below:https://t.co/z8CW6cSral

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) March 1, 2021

“We see a tectonic shift on the buy side, and it’s really accelerated within the last six to 12 months,” Robbins says. “Linear TV declines have accelerated to the point where finding a younger, light TV-viewing audience is increasingly challenging.

“At the same time, we’ve seen that streaming is surging. More than a third of Americans no longer have a paid TV subscription, and the amount of time spent with streaming is increasing.

“So, if you want to reach those cord cutters and those light TV viewers, you want to do that with better identity data, with more access to inventory, and better performance.”

Market position

Roku is the leading streaming TV platform device in the US and, with a growing offering to advertisers, the ad revenue it makes from that position is growing.

Last year, the company unveiled OneView, its own ad-buying platform.

Roku made $471.2 million in revenue from its platform in Q4 2020, 81% up on the year before, according to its recently-filed earnings.

This month, Roku announced it is acquiring Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising (AVA) business, which includes Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies, to accelerate its launch of an end-to-end DAI solution for TV programmers.

And it also announced it was acquiring rights to shows from ill-fated Quibi.

Best of both

For advertisers, the appeal of streaming TV services is not just accessing a demographic on the move – it is in mixing the best of both media worlds, Robbins thinks.

“What TV streaming brings ultimately is the branding power of the television screen mixed with the performance and attribution of the digital world,” he says.

The data seems to bear Robbins out:

• FrndlyTV, a virtual MVPD, recently said it had found 65% better return on investment from advertising its suite of channels through Roku that through a large social platform.
• Lexus recently increased its unique reach by 35% without spending more marketing dollars, by using Roku’s OneView to put all its data in one place, Robbins says.

Average revenue per Roku user has risen fast, from $7.83 in 2016 to $28.76 in 2020.

And the outlook could get better from here. According to Robbins’ company, in 2020, 38% of all smart TVs sold in the US were Roku TV models.

You are watching “Seeing Around Corners: Media Decisions During a Period of Disruption,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by Standard Media Index. For more videos, please visit this page.

The deal brings a robust offering of ACR (automatic content recognition) from Nielsen to an existing ACR operation at Roku. It also brings Nielsen’s dynamic ad insertion tools to Roku.

The solution is for the Roku “glass” – meaning  TVs that use the Roku operating system.

In its most recent earnings report, Roku said it was the number one smart TV OS sold in the U.S. and Canada, citing NPD’s Weekly Retail Tracking Service. Roku held 38% of the market share in the U.S. and 31% in Canada, the company said, citing NPD.

Late today, we spoke with Louqman Parampath, VP of product management at Roku, about the deal and its implications for marketers and national programmers.  He explained that the new scenario will bring fundamental change to linear TV advertising by allowing advertisers to target consumers on a household or regional basis with specific advertising.

He calls the development a “transformational” moment for programmers and marketers.

The deal also expands the collaboration between Roku and Nielsen around cross-screen measurement.

But, when it comes to TV, even connected TV, it’s not yet entirely clear that everything will be automated.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Roku VP of product management for advertising Louqman Parampath describes how his company wants to get there.

Programmatic rising

EMarketer in November estimated programmatic TV ad spending will reach $6.69 billion in the US by 2021, more than doubling from $2.77 billion.

That makes it a still-small but fast-growing part of the overall TV ad spending pie – 9.5% overall.

Ad buyers are getting interested by the ability to target specific audiences or households, the ability to use other data in doing so and the ability.

Growth factors

Roku’s Parampath says the CTV sector has had to fix issues including:

Identifiers

“When we started advertising on Roku five, six years ago, a lot of ad serving was fairly based on cookies and did not support the cookieless ecosystem very well,” he says. “Connected TV, similar to the mobile app ecosystem, is a cookieless ecosystem. So we worked on setting up an advertising ID, a Roku-specific advertising ID that can be used for frequency capping, that can be used for better targeting, and that can be used for better analytics and measurement.”

Server-side setup

“The other areas where ad serving had to evolve to meet the needs of connected TV are around integration with server-side ad insertion (SSAI). A lot of premium video is all server-side ad-inserted. And so, oftentimes, ad servers have to integrate with SSAI vendors.”

Pod management

“Connected TV’s typically a multi-ads-in-a-pod kind of an environment. So managing the competitive ad exclusion in a pod and sharing frequency capping in a pod and so on are important changes that many ad servers have had to support.”

Coming to a head

And the considerations don’t stop there.

The technology that has unlocked programmatic in desktop display and mobile was header bidding – allowing publishers to entertain ad bids from multiple demand sources simultaneously, thereby reaping higher yield.

But header bidding is more challenging to make work in a CTV environment. Parampath says it is “nascent” there.

“There’s a lot of innovation to happen there,” he says. “It will go in the direction of digital where it is more mature.

“But you would expect a somewhat of a different adoption trajectory and a somewhat of a different set of features required to make header bidding and connected TV work.

“Connected TV header bidding will have to look at how it works in a server-side ad in certain environments, how it works with SDKs that have to be integrated into multiple publisher apps in some scenarios and how does it manage challenges around video latencies and so on.”

You are watching “Making CTV Happen: A New Ad Infrastructure Emerges,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Publica. For more videos, please visit this page.

The CEO pair failed to make Quibi – which was designed to make short, snackable, high-quality entertainment available over smartphones – a success, with a proposition at $4.99 to $7.99 a month.

Last week, Roku acquired content distribution rights to 75 Quibi-commissioned shows, planning to make them available via its free, ad-supported Roku Channel.

Quibi's big stories are coming soon to a bigger screen for free on The #Roku Channel https://t.co/f44RUQHV0i pic.twitter.com/48YSYE2Jd3

— Roku (@Roku) January 8, 2021

Some first-runs

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Rob Holmes, VP of programming at Roku, describes the opportunity.

“More than 75 shows are going to be coming to the Roku Channel,” Holmes says. “A good number of them … this will be the first time that they’re available to this, this scale of audience. There’s over a dozen that are premiering on the Roku Channel for the first time

“This content features some of the best talent out there, both in front of and behind the camera. So something that we think will really resonate with our users.

Sticking to format

Quibi is so named for its unique format of delivering entertainment in “quick bites”. That “snackable” idea first emerged in mobile – but Roku’s Holmes says he plans to maintain the format on the large-screen TV.

“We’re going to be presenting the content in the same way that it was made available on the Quibi service, in terms of being episodic content,” he says.

“Fundamentally, it’s TV. It was created as TV content, it’ll play really well on TV.

“There’s this great kind of propulsion and linkage from episode to episode – they were really made as these type packages. It’s really compelling to watch and there’s this strong drive to sort of see the next chapter to see the next episode.”

More than 75 shortform Quibi shows will now have a home, with Roku acquiring the content library that a source values at less than $100 million. Details: https://t.co/yTzjn0vdY5 pic.twitter.com/cl5okBnN3I

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 8, 2021

AVOD emergence

Holmes thinks that won’t just please viewers, it will also satisfy advertisers.

“I think it will be phenomenal from an ad-supported experience,” he says. “It gives it a really nice spot to break, but a really compelling reason to stay through the ads and come back for the next episode.”

Despite offering apps from a plethora of TV and video services, Roku Channel is Roku’s own horse in the race, offering over 40,000 movies and TV episodes for free and becoming an ad-supported VOD (AVOD) provider in its own right. Quibi’s content could light up that opportunity further – and Holmes thinks the time is right for ad-supported VOD.

“As much as great content is the reason SVOD, free is a really compelling price,” he says. “People are able to supplement their subscription viewing with free, ad-supported viewing.

Learn more about today’s announcement  https://t.co/eoATJm0Xmw pic.twitter.com/qX4d02jJRu

— Roku (@Roku) January 6, 2021

Platform growth

A veteran of the TV dongle wars, Roku has emerged a winner. New NPD data showed Roku’s operating system remained the number one in the US (38% of market share) and Canada (31%) through 2020.

Roky also announced two user data points this week:

• Active user accounts grew by 14 million (37%) in 2020 to 21.2 million.
• Consumption reached 17 billion streaming hours in Q4, 58.7 billion hours in 2020 – a 55% increase year-on-year.

Roku Channel is Roku’s own content space within its Roku OS platform, which even gained its own TV-like electronic programme guide (EPG) for live discovery last year.

Roku says Roku Channel reached 61.8 million people in Q4 2020, doubling its household reach year-on-year.

That is partly because of a new recognition that different media markets have different qualities and consumers, and partly because people are realizing over-the-top TV (OTT) services have the ability to target at local level – like cable before them, perhaps even better.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kristin Wnuk, head of local and director of sales at Roku, explains what is going on.

Local growth

“The pandemic put a spotlight on how important local media is out in the marketplace,” she says.

Wnuk says this year has revealed how different parts of the US are moving differently in the evolution of OTT and connected TV.

“Not all states were having the same streaming habits when they went into lockdown,” she says.

For example, Tennessee and Kentucky adopted streaming ad different rates, whilst urban markets outpaced rural ones in terms of streaming growth. For example, New York saw a threefold volume of streaming growth versus Watford, North Dakota, Wnuk says.

We're excited to hear from @Roku's Kristin Wnuk about the acceleration of OTT & the opportunities in local media markets tomorrow during our new series, 'Targeted Strategies, Big Impact', w/ @Beet_TV. Presented by @NYInterconnect. Stay tuned https://t.co/fp4EzvUetJ pic.twitter.com/q0IHB6yTpF

— VAB (@VABintel) November 10, 2020

Agility amid chaos

“Advertisers needed flexibility in their media plans,” she says. “So we did offer that as part of our upfront and allowed advertisers to actually turn media on within a 24-hour period from a zip code to zip code perspective.”

Wnuk is describing the many advertisers which pivoted their creative early in the pandemic, to downplay scenes like touching or large gatherings.

In many cases, it was the agility of OTT platforms that allowed them to make speedy changes, versus traditional television.

Roku Unveils TV Ad Buying Solution

Finding viewers

Streaming services accounted for 25% of all US TV-viewing minutes during Q2 2020, according to Nielsen’s Streaming Meter.

The move to IP-based TV creates an opportunity to measure, track and target individual viewers or households, as well as their location.

That also creates an opportunity to go beyond broad DMAs (designated media areas).

“Tn the New York DMA, there’s over seven and a half million TV households and it can be challenging to really reach that true target and really get granular there in your targeting,” Roku’s Wnuk says.

“Roku creates a relationship with all of their users when they sign up. We’re building up sort of a dataset on each one of our users.

“We understand what our users are watching, what they’re searching for, and that really can help affect a marketer’s decisions. You can leverage Roku’s proprietary data when you’re targeting those audiences.”

Roku’s progress

In Q3, Roku reported a 43% year-on-year jump in active viewer accounts and doubled the account reach of its Roku Channel, one of its content offerings through against which it places ads. It reported a total 46 million active accounts.

More than that, Roku boasted a 90% year-on-year growth in monetized video ad impressions – up from the 50% annual growth it reported in Q2.

Basically, Roku is growing fast, and the pandemic has made it grow faster.

In May, the company unveiled OneView, its own demand-side platform (DSP), making available its ad inventory directly to buyers.

You are watching “Targeted Strategies, Big Impact: TV Powered by Data, Addressability and Consumer Choice,” a leadership video series from Beet.TV and VAB. For more videos, please visit this page.  

But could the technology also be a boon for buyers?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the director of ad platforms at one of the two leading over-the-top TV device conduits says it could be.

Both sides benefit

“Header bidding is probably a good solution for both the buy side and sell side,” says Roku’s Youssef Ben-Youssef.

• “On the buy side, an agency or a DSP will be able to access a lot of inventory, improve their reach and reduce the fact that they have to reach out to each publisher and build the relationship with them before accessing that inventory.
• “On the supply side, this is one tool to help publishers sell their inventory in an efficient fashion and access a lot of demand that potentially they don’t have access to today.”

Ben-Youssef was speaking after PubMatic, an ad-tech platform vendor launched OpenWrap OTT, its header bidding solution for over-the-top TV services.

He acknowledges that header bidding, when applied to real-time TV, poses challenges on overcoming latency issues – the kinds of challenge that such vendors are having to tackle.

Rocking Roku

Ben-Youssef’s Roku leads the pack when it comes to share of the over-the-top (OTT) TV stick and box market, according to 2019 data from TDG and Strategy Analytics.

But Roku these days isn’t just a gateway to TV for other publishers and their advertising customers.

That deployment lead has given Roku an advantageous position both a direct ad sales house and a middleman.

The company made $742 million in advertising and commission in 2019.

The outfit holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Last year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.

Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.

Roku also operates a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

All-in on programmatic

Roku previously acquired dataxu, a demand-side ad-buying platform, for $150 million, and then relaunched it as “OneView“.

“The OneView DSP will allow advertisers and agencies to reach the Roku households, about 39.8 million active accounts today,” Ben-Youssef says.

“Thanks to the awesome device graph that we have on the DSP, you can extend that reach actually to 105 million households through executing an omnichannel platform campaign.

“We understood from the beginning that all ads eventually will be running through programmatic.

“We sell our inventory in the programmatic entity fashion, also in PMP fashion. We do not sell our inventory in the open exchange and I talk a lot to publishers on our platform.”

This is from a Beet.TV series titled “The Accelerated Evolution of Programmatic OTT” presented by PubMatic.  for more videos please visit this page. 

The form factor is getting a big boost from brand marketers during the pandemic, says Alison Levin of Roku, VP of Ads & Strategy at Roku in this interview with Beet.TV

She explains that brands are seeking to provide direct feedback on store locations and other personal messaging to their consumers.  Sponsorships with give-aways are also becoming popular with brands.

Levin details how the suspension of live sports programming has transitioned many “heavy sports” linear consumer to streaming and how the use of “day parts” is dramatically changing.  All this is changing TV buying dynamics.

And she provides an update on the integration with dataxu which Roku acquired last year.

After previously getting its software embedded on TVs from TCL, Sharp and Hisense in the US, Roku last month struck its first deal to launch a Roku-powered TV outside of North America.

Tariq Mahmoud, Roku’s international head of sales and strategy, explained the deal in this video interview with Furious Corp’s Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the Roku TV licensing programme is expanding into Europe! https://t.co/q2aqRNEDVk #roku #happystreaming @HisenseUK pic.twitter.com/jt4j1Fl6tV

— RokuUK (@RokuUK) September 7, 2019

“We just launched Roku TVs last month in the UK, working with Hisense as our TV OEM partner,” he says. “This is Roku software embedded onto Hisense hardware with Argos being our primary launch partner from a retailer point of view.

“We’re really excited about what this brings to consumers in the UK. It provides them an opportunity to engage with the Roku platform as their primary source.

“It allows us to be able to do more things on the advertising side with regards to data that we gather from that platform.”

We previously reported Roku’s significant lead over rivals when it comes to use of streaming TV device platforms, according to sales data crunched by Strategy Analytics.

But Roku’s looming challenge was underscored this month in an article by Bloomberg BusinessWeek describing Roku as “under siege”

A range of alternative add-on devices is competing for share. And, whilst Roku is building a sizeable ad sales business, AVOD services are also keen to stake out ad-supported OTT for themselves.

In October, Roku announced its plan to acquire dataxu, a demand-side ad-buying platform, for $150 million.

Mahmoud said the deal bolsters Roku in three ways:

1. “It enables buyers to fully plan and optimise for their ad buy across multiple channels of, primarily, Roku.”
2. “It also then enables them to buy in real-time inventory in an automated capacity using programmatic means through the DSP technology itself.”
3. “It allows them to measure, in rea-time, their ad buys’ effectiveness on the platform directly using first-party data that Roku has by having a direct relationship with the consumer.”

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

The new solution marries OTT and linear TV occurrence and identity data from Roku’s 30.5 million active accounts as of June 30, with Innovid’s OTT ad serving footprint across over 75 million households. Matched together, the unique datasets are expected to provide marketers with new insights to better allocate advertising inventory bought from Roku and from other publishers without additional tagging or integrations.

For an overview of the new alliance, we spoke with Tal Chalozin, co-founder and CTO of Innovid.

We interviewed him during Advertising Week.

This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019.  This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week.   The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company.  Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tariq Mahmoud, Roku head of international sales and strategy, describes a disconnect he expects will be closed in the next few years.

‘There’s this delta right now between OTT viewing and OTT ad spend,” Mahmoud says. “That will get closer and closer over time. Just like we saw in digital over the last five years, I think we’ll see that in TV as well. Ad spend on OTT … will catch up to viewership on OTT.”

His comments come as just-published analysis by Strategy Analytics shows how Roku’s lead for connected TV device adoption is accelerating. More than 30% of the connected TV devices sold in the US in Q1 2019 were Roku devices, it says…

And the observation is interesting. eMarketer forecasts OTT viewing reaching another 1.7% of the US population by 2021…

But Winterberry Group sees US OTT advertising spend slowing, from 42% in 2018 to 20% in 2019…

That illustrates the need for OTT ad spending to catch up to OTT viewing.

Roku is well positioned. An attractive pricepoint, a simple proposition and integration in some TV sets is seeing Roku pull away from the rest of the pack, according to Strategy Analytics.

There are now more than 41 million Roku-based devices in use, including Roku media streamers and Roku-based smart TVs, accounting for 15.2% of all media streaming devices.

Roku now has a 36% lead over the next major platform, Sony PlayStation, in terms of devices in use. The report predicts that this lead will stretch to 70% by the end of the year, largely as a result of the success of Roku’s smart TV partner strategy.

Mahmoud says: “In Q1 of this year alone, we reached 29 million active accounts, which was 2 million more than the quarter before that, 9 billion hours of total hours streaming, relative to about 25 billion last year in total, 9 billion just of Q1, so our growth is tremendous.”

So, what is Roku doing to win advertising?

The outfit holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Earlier this year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.

Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.

Twelve months ago, Roku launched a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page

That is what Roku is endeavoring to do, by launching a new Measurement Partner Program.

The scheme involves a number of aspects like audience demographics, brand awareness, store visits, website visits and sales increases being measured by bona fide companies, namely 11 of them – Nielsen, comScore, ResearchNow, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Acxiom, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, Kantar, Placed, Factual, and Polk.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Roku director of ad programming and research Dan Robbins explains why Roku has launched the program.

“The whole real goal of this is to make it easy for brands to say, ‘This is what my key KPI is or this is what I’m trying to get out of OTT advertising and bringing transparent third party measurement that helps meet those needs’,” Robbins says.

“As the largest streaming platform, we have registration data about who our households are, we know what they’re viewing. We’re able to directly integrate with these measurement partners.”

Roku’s position in the expanding OTT ad horizon is growing. Earlier this year, the company, which makes devices through which content companies make streaming content available to the TV, launched an OTT  marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

Roughly half of the company’s revenue now comes from “platform”, including ad sales, no longer just from sales of sticks and gadgets.

The new Measurement Partner Program is available to both advertisers and content publishers who want to testify the size of their audience.

But Roku already knows the size of its audience. “Our mission is to be the operating system of television – we now have about 22 million active accounts,” Robbins tells Beet.TV.

Robbins reveals one early insight proved by the program. The Jack In The Box fast-food chain worked with Placed, which uses geo-location to prove real-world footfall prompted by ad exposure, and found that its Roku ad campaign drove more than 160,000 store visits.

“The market is crying for more video. There is a huge shortage on that market,” says Dominique Delport, who is President, International & Global Chief Revenue Officer, at Vice Media.

In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual DMEXCO conference, Delport says two main features of VICE Media Everywhere are premium content in brand-safe environments and the ability to reach the 18-35 audience that isn’t being addressed by legacy media providers.

“The other issue is it’s super complex,” Delport explains. “We moved from medium is a message to medium is a mess. Today, to buy video with all the platforms, all the formats, is incredibly complicated.”

VICE Video Everywhere guarantees that brands’ advertising assets will only run on VICE owned and therefore produced content. Viewability is addressed through the offering of a vCPM pricing model for advertisers that prefer a 100% viewable approach. Measurement for buys is available through a number of market leading third parties.

To reach the 18-35 audience at the core of VICE’s offerings, “You have that ability, I would say in one click, to tap into Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Apple News, Roku, Viceland, YouTube, great video inventory vice premium content,” Delport adds.

He estimates that VICE produces some 1,500 pieces of content daily, in local languages, for audiences that include 55 million people on Snapchat. When the company started up in India a few months back, it decided to champion the cause of rights for women and LGBT people.

“After a few months of pushing the society forward, to see the Supreme Court decriminalizing LGBT behavior in India is a big achievement for the Indian society, and we’re very proud, even humbled, to have contributed to that change. We give a mic to a generation that is still very unheard by the legacy media.”

Having joined VICE four months ago from Vivendi Content and Havas, reporting to new CEO Nancy Dubuc, Delport describes himself as “still a rookie, still an intern, learning every day and impressed every day with what Vice has delivered so far.”

This interview is part of a series titled Advertising Reimagined: The View from DMEXCO 2018, presented by Criteo.  Please find more videos from the series here. 

Corbelli puts reasons for all those machinations into three buckets: vertical integration on the technology side, reach across screens and distribution points and “the ability to offer great content in this three-screen, streaming world,” the Chairman and CEO of BrightLine says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Originally known for its pioneering dynamic television ad solutions for brands, BrightLine early in 2018 launched DataCast, a unified OTT data platform that enables advertisers to target and measure across mobile, desktop and television screens. DataCast links commonly sought audience segments to TV screens—for example automobile purchase intenders—then identifies specific households within the BrightLine OTT footprint that match the target audience segments. Targeted campaigns using enhanced and/or traditional TV commercials can be sent to those households.

For DataCast, BrightLine’s media partners integrate the company’s technology within their OTT apps across the full OTT device footprint, including FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, IOS and Android. Household reach is currently 68 million.

Corbelli’s perspective helps to make sense of the seemingly frantic consolidation happening in the TV space. “You see AT&T trying to combine its distribution assets and the content that Time Warner owns. You see the AppNexus acquisition as being part of how digital becomes truly integrated with not just desktop and mobile but also telecom and television.”

She sees something similar happening with “the fight for Fox, as I call it. Very specifically, there’s a content play there, a content rollup, there’s a distribution play. It’s why Sky is as important as it is to Comcast.”

Meanwhile, she considers Hulu as the strongest ad-supported asset “that any media company could own in a space that is exploding. They’ve got 60% of all streams right now in the ad-supported environment. Not surprisingly, it feels a little bit like a free-for-all for who owns Hulu.”

Finally there’s Netflix, which in some quarters is considered to be an eventual convert to ad-supported content. “I think folks like Netflix are in for some challenges with all this consolidation going on,” says Corbelli, noting that Amazon is talking about offering ads on pre-roll. “I think that’s how the models start to shake out. You’re going to see a combination of subscription revenue and ad revenue and you start to see a lot of common models out there.”

This segment is from a Beet.TV series “It’s an OTT World” presented by BrightLine. Please visit this page for additional videos.

But he wasn’t kidding. Roku, which has been making streaming media players for TV for a decade now, generated $225 million in platform revenue last year, which includes advertising. According to this Motley Fool analysis, whilst eMarketer has forecast that will reach $290 million this year. The total revenue last year was $513 million which includes sales of Roku devices as well.

The company benefits from a large install base and by opportunities to sell ads in to a portion of inventory owned by video service providers running over Roku devices. Now Roku is leaning in to the ad business fully, last month launching a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Roku demand partnerships VP Seth Walters explains: “We’re calling this the Audience Marketplace. It’s a new way for buyers and sellers to transact premium inventory on Roku. Publishers can convert their broad-based video inventory that runs on the platform to target it.

“For buyers, it’s about eliminating waste and addressing a more relevant audience with their ads that they serve and the campaigns that they run directly with publishers on the platform.”

So far, Fox, Turner and Viacom have all signed up to make their inventory available through Audience Marketplace, lending heavyweight network credibility to Roku’s offering.

Ads can be targeted based on Roku’s user registration data, advertisers’ first- or third-party data sets plus Roku’s own captured viewer behaviour data as sourced through recording viewers’ streaming behaviour, plus monitoring for viewership using automated content recognition built in to smart TVs on which Roku’s software is installed.

In one more indication of how important advertising is to Roku, Walters joined the company from an ad agency, leaving as president of Group M’s advanced TV unit MODI Media last September after a long tenure in agency land.

“In Q1 of this year, our platform business, which includes advertising, for the very first time revenue exceeded that of the player business, which is actually hardware sales,” he adds.

“(Advertisers) know that the audiences are there (on OTT platforms), and they know that they increasingly have to think about OTT as a channel where they’re running and messaging to their consumers in order to get scale.”

He says Roku’s ability to insert ads in to inventory from a multitude of services carried on its platform makes ad buying more straightforward than going to each of those individual services directly.

There are 65 million households using some type of device to access premium video content in the living room and, for the first time, more than 50% of video starts being delivered on a connected-TV device are ad-supported, the Head of Advanced TV & Video explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“You’ve seen the viewership change, you’ve seen people embrace it as their primary source of content and you’ve seen these devices take over control of HDMI1 on the TV, which is the most important thing to control,” Fisher says. “No longer is a Roku device a way to get Netflix on your TV. A Roku device is a way to get TV.”

While connected TV definitely is the “low-hanging fruit for what we’re doing at MediaMath today,” within three to five years all linear impressions will become one-to-one addressable and targetable through the rise of IP video, “so we want to be well positioned to be able to play in that space as well.”

MediaMath doesn’t buy or arbitrage TV inventory. Rather, it sees itself as the connection point between buyers and sellers, according to Fisher.

“We’ve curated our list of supply sources that we do most of our transactions with down to, say, the top twenty percent of supply sources that drive eighty percent of the meaningful impressions that marketers are looking for,” he says.

Those sources include five network groups and three big virtual MVPD services in a fraud-free environment. “We’re never more than one hop away from the end seller,” Fisher adds.

MediaMath’s pitch to traditional TV buyers is one of reach and frequency and how they can shift a portion of their spend “to the same inventory and the same viewer model and the same screen they know how to buy but doing it in a smarter, more measureable way.”

The company tells the same story to digital buyers but with a twist since they already know how to buy audiences, measurable impressions and retargeted campaigns. “For the first time, a digital buyer has the ability to transact on the biggest most trusted screen in the house in a way that they know how to do and in a way that fits into their business model.”

With its cross-device graph and audience targeting capabilities, MediaMath sees itself as leading the charge in tying back actual down-funnel attribution to upper funnel branding metrics.

“Being able to say the first time a viewer is exposed to an ad campaign or a brand’s message should happen in video. Whether or not that’s web, mobile, tablet or TV, video is the best way to tell that upper-funnel branding story,” says Fisher.

“But that doesn’t get you all the way there as a marketer. You want to be able to find that household, find the users in that household, and tell a down-funnel story to drive attribution and actual action on the right screen with the right message at the right time.”

This video is part of the Beet.TV series titled Targeting Today’s TV Viewer sponsored by DISH Media Sales. It is published along with this DISH Media Sales Straightforward Guide in ADWEEK. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Chances are, we’ve probably done some work for someone with a similar objective or we’re actually working with an ad studio that has the creativity, the flexibility and the prowess to help them think through how we can do that in our ad format.”

Just after the Cannes Festival concluded, true[X] said that it has reached a one-year deal with GroupM digital agency Essence to develop and test new approaches for connected TV advertising. As Advertising Age reports, the aim is to develop consumer-friendly and compelling brand experiences that can scale to connected-TV offerings like Roku and Apple TV. In addition, Essence will be the first agency to access engagement ads programmatically.

At Cannes, true[X]’s focus on brand lift as a measure of success “is really resonating here,” says Midha. “There’s no better personal primetime than the OTT viewing we see happening across our publisher partners.”

Asked to comment on developments in OTT measurement, Midha says, “It’s unfortunate that it’s a little bit nascent because it’s such an incredible viewing environment. There’s a lack of standardization in those platforms. Each one is a little bit different, which makes rolling measurement across very difficult. It’s not something that’s happened quickly.”

True[X] has already built a measurement tool that can live in all OTT environments called Uplift, which measures brand lift.

“Because if you want to create a brand, you need emotion. That’s the difference between a brand and a product. The first thing you need to do that is you need to have attention, which is what our format is about, and once you have attention you want to make sure you’re lifting your brand and you’re having impact. We’re trying to follow the whole thread.”

This video is from a series of videos and sessions produced in partnership with FreeWheel at Cannes 2018 as part of the FreeWheel Forum on the Future of Television. You can find more videos from this series here.

To CRO Rob Weisbord, Sinclair’s future road map will let advertisers extend reach from linear TV to “those cord cutters, cord nevers, cord savers through OTT solutions whether it’s through directly relationships with OTT providers or through an investment we have an in RTB company that is also buying excess inventory on the exchange level.”

In this interview with Beet.TV at the Advanced Advertising Summit, Weisbord says Sinclair will have an edge when offering addressable ads because of the breadth of pod lengths it plans to offer.

In addition to ramping up OTT service, “you’ll see us in the app format as well, more in a portal situation, amalgamating all our content and sourced content versus just trying to put one TV station over the top.

“The road map is we have our own content product team and they’ll be building apps and assets for connected TV as well as for the typical delivery services of Roku, Apple TV, Firestick and so forth. If you’re not on all platforms and if we’re not relevant on all platforms, our brand will be infringed,” Weisbord adds.

He sees ATSC 3.0 as overlaying IP technology with linear transmission and “the next step progression of one-to-one delivery, personalized content. And that will allow that delivery to connected cars, to mobile devices, and ultimately to the television sets within the home.”

Full rollout is three to five years. In the meantime, the Dallas test is aimed at generating proof of content and by validating any of “several business models that have yet to come to fruition that are on a whiteboard being framed.”

Asked about advertisers’ use of addressable TV, Weisbord believes that brands need to be developed through the use of mass media and then “finite the message.”

Noting that most MVPD’s allot two minutes of every programming hour to addressable ads—typically offering 30- and 60-second spots but not 15’s, “Depending on the demand we’ll open or close the supply. So we’ll have a mover advantage by being able to deliver fifteen’s.”

This video was produced at the Advanced Advertising Summit in New York. Please find more videos on this page from the Beet.TV series presented by 4C.

“Measurement is essential to moving OTT forward within the media and advertising space,” says Dan Robbins, Head of Ad Research & Insights, Roku, in this interview with Beet.TV. “Our mission is to be the operating system of television.”

As the #1 streaming platform, Roku wants to “create advertising with light ad loads, engaging interactive experiences that bring the best of TV, the branding and safety of the living room screen, with the best of digital,” Robbins says.

Roku Ad Insights consists of:

Reach Insights, wherein advertisers can quantify unique campaign reach by demographic segments across linear TV, OTT, desktop and mobile.

Tune-In Insights, so that TV networks and content owners can measure the effectiveness of content promotions they run across linear TV, OTT, desktop and mobile. “If you’re running a promo for a show on Roku, what’s the lift on traditional TV, or if you watch a promo on traditional TV what’s that lift back on streaming,” Robbins explains.

Cord Cutter Insights, for campaigns delivered to Roku users who don’t have traditional pay TV subscriptions so that advertisers can “validate that your one-to-one targeting actually reached that that cord-cutter cohort.”

Survey Insights, which enables marketers to gather real-time feedback and demographic insights with short, on-device viewer surveys. Insights can include “how these folks think, who they are, what they like, how they receive and interact with advertising,” says Robbins.

Roku is working with more than a dozen advertisers on the Ad Insights Suite, according to Robbins.

In addition to registration data about Roku users on a household basis and streaming data about programs and advertisements, the company’s TV sets have automatic content recognition capabilities to track linear TV program consumption and ad viewing.

A news release announcing the Roku Ad Insights Suite quotes Marissa Jimenez, President of GroupM’s Modi Media, as saying that the offerings “allow us to better understand how OTT ads perform compared to other platforms, which in turn can influence media spend.”

Now buyers can reach specific targets—moms with kids who live in a certain area and might have a mortgage—across DISH and Sling combined. “We will go ahead and work with a data provider and find those moms with kids, not only just on DISH but also now on Sling through all of Sling’s outlets,” including iOS, Android, PC, Mac, Roku, Apple TV, smart TV’s and Chromecast, says Adam Lowy, Director, Advanced TV & Digital Sales, DISH Media Sales & Sling TV.”

Asked about the growth of addressable in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2018, Lowy adds, “It’s been a huge business for us. We’ve seen huge growth in the industry.”

What comScore added to the mix was “we wanted one true measurement. This is how many impressions you delivered holistically to that entire addressable audience across all the platforms that those two outlets cover.”

Lowy thinks the potential goes beyond DISH and Sling to a broader industry that wants to expand the potential of addressability for better audience-based targeting and attribution.

“As the industry is starting to evolve and do cross-platform and have live and on-demand television top-tier television as we do on all platforms, this measurement will probably go across the ecosystem and that’s what we see.”

While addressable has been a “hockey stick” business for DISH, according to Lowy, it “just needs more growth.”

When the deal with comScore was announced on Jan. 4, the company became the first to offer services that measure addressable television impressions across all platforms, including over-the-top (OTT).

“It grows the entire ecosystem finds the audience everywhere and it really makes addressable television so much more important but in top-tier premium content,” Lowy says. “We don’t ever want to dismiss how important that premium safe content is. That is what sling TV is.”

This video was produced by Beet.TV in Las Vegas at CES 2018.   Please visit this page for more coverage. 

BACK TO VEGAS: CES 2018

In the connected-TV and OTT space, “There are quite a few ad-supported services and those are growing,” including Crackle, Vudu and Pluto TV, says Jonathan Bokor, Director, Precision Video, Publicis Media Exchange.

In terms of channels or apps being viewed, non-linear viewing does continue to fragment viewership, Bokor explains in this interview at the recent Beet Retreat Miami 2017. And since inventory on platforms like Roku is purchased across the entire footprint, it’s done by demographics.

“But we’re starting to see and we’re working on programmatic activation. Instead of buying demo, buying audiences on connected TV, which I think is the promising area. Fragmentation is somewhat less of an issue when you’re buying an audience across apps.”

Cable TV operators continue to enable addressable advertising technology, thereby expanding the pool of households than can be targeted with specific ads, but it’s a system-by-system approach and doesn’t yet provide anything near national reach.

“We do get sort of national reach with the satellite operators because they can be accessed anywhere, but it’s a spotty national,” Bokor says.

What’s changing is that programmers themselves are trying to up the addressable inventory pool.

“I’ve seen some outreach from a few of the larger network groups who have secured some inventory on the Comcast platform coming to us and wanting us to invest in addressable TV through the programmer as opposed to the MPVD. That’s a big difference,” Bokor adds.

Streaming pioneer Hulu “really is connected TV and it’s the largest publisher,” while Roku aggregates ad inventory it secures from programmers. “Roku has been a significant source of inventory.”

Publicis is “working very hard to identify the partners” that can provide “a programmatic pathway for our video teams to be able to access audiences on connected TV across any connected-TV device.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat Miami, 2017 presented by Videology along with Alphonso and 605. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.

That narrative is about “advancing the conversation away from adults 18 to 49 to what is your actual target, what is your actual goal” as an advertiser, Fox’s SVP, Advertising Data & Technology Solutions, says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Fox unveiled the trial with Comcast during NYC TV Week. With on-demand programming and streaming, Fox’s addressable advertising can reach audiences that may not be watching linear, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.

“We have the ability to sell and activate data in the same exact ways that MVPD’s are out there selling addressable today,” Levine explains.

The link with Hulu is to reach viewers who use connected-TV devices like Apple TV and Roku but it also applies to Hulu’s mobile and desktop viewing experiences, according to Levine.

On its cable network properties, MVPD’s get two minutes per hour of ad inventory to sell. Fox gets to monetize all of the remaining ad minutes.

“What we’re doing is packaging up that inventory to allow advertisers and agencies to take their first-party data, any combination of third-party data, and be able to match that against the MVPDs’ sense of identity through a safe haven,” says Levine.

Both Fox and Comcast use FreeWheel to handle ad insertions.

Fox has been offering addressable ads via its Fox AIM solution to reach its linear TV audiences. By adding in Comcast, “It’s now a cross-platform solution. We can provide the best worlds to an advertiser,” says Levine.

The Comcast and Hulu endeavors are the latest steps in Fox’s desire to “bring the future of TV advertising to market today.” It’s already rolled out six-second ads in linear-delivered programming and sponsored streams in VOD.

Reducing waste is one of the goals. “A lot of people argue that, ‘hey there really is no waste.’ There actually is waste and the waste is wasting the audience’s time,” Levine says.

“We as the media seller take on the responsibility to provide a better end user experience by having the option to cut down the ad load and be able to ensure that they’re the most relevant ads that are going to drive the highest ROI for the buyers.”

This video is part of a series of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Advanced Advertising conference held during NYC TV Week. Beet.TV’s coverage is presented by 4C Insights. Please find additional videos on this page.

The first installment of Signature Insights is titled The Power of OTT: Audiences & Engagement and is devoted to all things OTT.

“OTT in general is something that publishers have been investing a lot in. But I think there’s still a lot of opportunity and it’s sort of being undervalued in the market today,” Ying Wang, Director, Advisory Services, FreeWheel says in this interview with Beet.TV.

The overarching goal of the new research is to showcase the value of OTT, why advertisers should be buying it, how publishers should discuss it in the marketplace and to provide them with “more tools to be able to build value from that inventory,” says Wang.

While most people are familiar with OTT devices like Roku, Apple TV, game consoles and smart television sets, “I think a lot of the people who are buying digital are confused with OTT,” Wang adds.

Given uncertainty about how to buy, measure and transact on OTT ad inventory, there’s hesitation on budget allocation.

“I think that’s driving a lot of the issues in making OTT a bigger platform than it is today,” says Wang.

On the sell-side, FreeWheel’s clients are seeking more data to enlighten them on how they should be transacting OTT. “Right now, a lot of OTT is still flowing through direct sales channels, but there’s a lot of interest in trying to sell it programmatically.”

Thus the initial installment of Signature Insights will provide a complete understanding of the tools FreeWheel offers its clients so they can open up OTT to new demand sources in a safe manner.

When asked what’s next for FreeWheel’s new research track in 2017 Wang notes, “the theme of this year for FreeWheel and our research is unification; the lines between different screens are blurring.” FreeWheel’s new research track will explore ways in which publishers and advertisers can take advantage of the evolving landscape by studying activities like changing selling patterns, and how measurement is enabling cross-screen buys.

Then there is the user experience, which “continues to be something that’s a priority for our clients.” In addition to determining the optimal ad load and controlling creative repetition, “how do you get users coming back to your content is something that we want to look more into as well.”

This interview was recorded in Manhattan as part of the Comcast/FreeWheel 2017 U.S. Client Summit “Unifying The New TV Ecosystem.” This series of videos from the summit is presented by FreeWheel.

According to President & Chief Operating Officer Gretchen Tibbits, comScore data show that at 55.8 million women, Little Things claims the mantles of largest standalone lifestyle site and the largest URL reaching women.

“We’re very protective of our audience,” Tibbits says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts. “We all know that there are challenging things going on the world and there’s plenty of places for an audience to get that content. We’re not that.”

That protection encompasses not only content but also user experience. The Little Things website “is very ad light,” says Tibbits, and there are no content recommendation widgets to slow down page loading.

Little Things took to the NewFronts to unveil a new talk show series, “The Daily Glow,” which will debut on June 5 and air every weekday afternoon on Facebook Live. In addition, the company by mid-summer will distribute its long-form video programming via Amazon, Apple TV, Roku, XUMO and Pluto TV, as Campaign reports.

“The Daily Glow” is the 13th show from Little Things. The shows consist of episodes ranging from 30 to 60 minutes in length.

The company’s goal with branded and sponsored content is that “it’s woven in,” be it sponsorship of a live show or custom videos. “We can tell a story that our writers, editors and researchers have found and if a brand wants to join us on that journey, it’s an incredible service to the audience and to the brand,” Tibbits says.

Facebook has turned out to be a very productive “front door” for Little Things, generating website traffic and new users. Although it claims to generate less output on Facebook than other publishers, what Little Things does publish “has the highest engagement per article of anybody doing it,” Tibbits adds.

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

Entrepreneur not only provides these personalities with a high-profile platform but a relationship with a well-known brand and distribution, both proprietary and syndicated.

“It’s not just about YouTube revenue, because that’s minimal,” Shaw explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the Digital Content NewFronts. “It’s about being associated with our brand so we can integrate you in as a sponsor. Bring influencers to advertisers.”

Entrepreneur.com has a monthly global reach of 14 million and more than 11 million followers on social platforms. “With our social platforms we are 100% organic. I have never bought one person for my social.”

In addition, Entrepreneur magazine reaches 3.1 million readers around the world global each month and is growing, according to Shaw.

“We’re extremely happy because we have all these great distribution tools and we have pretty solid partnerships with MSN and USA TODAY for syndicating content.”

In the over-the-top video space the company is available through Roku, Apple TV and Amazon. Asked to chart the course ahead, Shaw mentions “a couple of TV programs that you’ll see in the near future,” adding that Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch “will be one of them.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

His focus is on emerging platforms like Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV Stick. “Our North Star is truly addressing audiences at a household level,” Walters explains in this interview at this year’s Beet.TV Executive Retreat titled Video Everywhere! The Transformation of Media & Advertising.

One of the benefits of connected TV and a “profile-type environment” is being able to take targeting down a step further and pinpoint specific household members, according to Walters. “Increasingly, we’re trying to work with our partners to help enable this for clients,” he says.

Modi approaches video investments for its clients at a portfolio level, paying particular attention to decision creative iterations for targeted households. For example, a household whose known annual income is $250,000 might see an ad for the American Express Platinum Card.

“We’re also able to look at the outcome and understand if that exposure is driving traffic to the website and conversions, to really move that altogether to create more value,” Walters says.

His passion for commerce-enabled interactivity derives from being able to pre-qualify an audience and target them based on purchase behavior. Or to provide people with the ability to purchase something immediately or “at the very least add to a cart to move them down the funnel.”

He cites Amazon as a major player in using first-party and purchase behavior to understand and motivate its users. “I’m excited when it goes beyond just enabling through a tile on Amazon Fire TV to something we can actually build throughout our entire video investment on their platform and off,” says Walters.

This video is part of a series produced at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. The event and series is presented by Videology and 605. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.