Outside and inside the CTV channel: how can marketers take advantage of Roku’s reach?

The CTV market landscape is diverse and keeps expanding, though the top spot still belongs to Roku

The CTV market landscape is diverse and keeps expanding, though the top spot still belongs to Roku, which is expected to reach 100 million users by the end of this year and grow by almost 30% by 2023. Together with Amazon, Roku controls two-thirds of the US connected TV market and powers one in three smart TVs sold in the US.

Along with the increasing audience, Roku ad revenues keep growing as well. Despite the pandemic, it’s forecast to double over the next two years.

Roku strives to close the loop for everyone involved in CTV advertising. Thus, along with providing advertising opportunities for the buy-side, the platform has also rolled out promotion tools for content producers.

From linear TV and Youtube to CTV indie channels

Video content created and spread by independent producers has been proliferated across the Internet with the rise of YouTube. As the great migration to CTV has begun, content producers took their place within CTV ecosystems. Thus, the Roku app store accounts for about 20k apps by 5.5k app publishers.

To help channel owners grow their audiences and revenues, Roku provides vast monetization and promotion opportunities. Specifically, app owners can earn through combining their own and Roku’s ad inventory, revenue share, content gating options, and product placement featuring products within the video content. As for the app promotion toolkit, Roku publishers can expand their audiences by leveraging a self-serve offering with targeted display and video ads plus partnership programs.

What Roku is offering is quite ample compared to its competitors, yet, it’s not as perfect from the app owner’s perspective. Specifically, Roku can charge pretty high CPM rates, whereas its potential, measured in installs and clicks, remains underutilized. Actually, for the same budgets, Roku app owners can get 60% more installs. This is what Allroll, a marketing platform for CTV channel owners, brings to the table. With its self-serve option, allowing app owners to run, optimize, and measure their ad campaigns, Roku app owners can increase their channels’ exposure with more cost-efficiency.

Back to the buy-side advertising opportunities, Roku operates its own DSP, OneView, that offers Roku’s household data and first-party measurements. Yet, this is not the only option for advertisers. For instance, TVadSync DSP allows marketers to run and measure campaigns across Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV Sticks, and Apple TV. One more platform, Launch Media, offers streaming advertising focused solely on Roku.

CTV highs and lows

Apart from growing ownership and opportunities to stand out across the various streaming platforms, advertisers can leverage other CTV advancements with:

• Wider reach: CTV allows marketers to extend the reach of linear TV campaigns and exclusive fragmented audiences of cord-cutters and cord-nevers, mainly represented by desired millennials and Generation Z audiences.

• Enhanced interactivity: CTV's capabilities can considerably enhance customer engagement and help advertisers create more personalized and interactive experiences for consumers.

• Higher viewability: with CTV, advertisers can extend the viewer's time spent with their advertising, in turn increasing brand awareness and opportunities for conversions.

Along with that, CTV still has to gain more maturity in standardization and ad buying to provide a fully hassle-free experience to advertisers. So far, several areas that need improvement are:

• Planning and buying: the variety of platforms and devices is overwhelming, as each comes with its own set of pricing models and specs. To handle this process and reach specific audiences at scale, advertisers have to aggregate multi-publisher private marketplace packages.

• Creative fragmentation: in addition to numerous creative, ad formatting, and ingestion specs, advertisers are challenged by scaling ad creative across the platforms. Besides aligning the ad creative accompanying the CTV content remains opaque.

• Measurement hurdles: a lot of work needs to be done to bring order and common standards into audience identification, ad frequency capping, campaign impact measurement, attribution details, and data ownership.

Connecting the dots

While looking for ways to embrace advertising with leading and fast-growing platforms, like Roku, it’s essential to stay open to all kinds of possibilities. With a broader selection of ad channels, not limited by native solutions alone, you can get more exposure while minimizing your ad investments.