Tariffs are driving up the prices on various goods, but for now, consumers still seem to (mostly) be shopping—and this upfronts season, streamers are hoping brands will keep selling to them through their increasingly sophisticated shoppable ads products.
The opportunity for brands is growing: The average US consumer shells out a cool $290 per year on items they saw while watching TV, according to a September 2024 report from Emarketer and shoppable retail media platform Shopsense AI. By 2027, there are expected to be 109 million shoppable media buyers in the US.
After rolling out shoppable ad options in earnest over the past several years, streaming giants like NBCU and Roku have made significant investments into their shoppable ad offerings to try to meet the growing opportunity.
“We need to meet the consumer where they’re at in terms of how they want to interact and shop from TV,” Evan Moore, SVP of commerce partnerships at NBCU, told Marketing Brew. “Sometimes that’s going to be using their remote on screen; other times it might mean they take it to a second screen and continue to shop while watching TV.”
Give the people what they want
NBCU, for one, has seen an uptick in demand and spending on its shoppable ad offerings in 2024 and 2025, which includes offerings like Virtual Concessions and Must Shop TV, Moore told us. According to NBCU data, from Q3 2023 to Q4 2024, shoppable activations on its platforms that incorporated stories and talent from NBCU-owned properties saw a 378% increase in engagement as well as a 171% increase in brand favorability. Overall, there’s been a 60% YoY increase in purchase growth from commerce activations in the same time period, Moore said.
In general, the format has seen strong interest from the CPG and retail verticals, according to Moore. NBCU is offering Peacock interactive shoppable video ads at a CPM of around $29, according to an agency familiar with the company’s ad rates, slightly lower than Prime Video’s shoppable carousel ads on Prime Video, which are priced at around $31.75.
Because shoppable ads on NBCU properties are usually accessed on a second screen, like a phone after scanning an onscreen QR code, the company is building out options for viewers to shop using their TV remotes, Moore said. As a part of the effort, NBCU debuted a partnership with LG at ShopTalk in March that will allow those who have LG TVs to use their LG remotes to browse and buy items on certain NBCU programming..
Second nature
Roku is also leaning into remote-centric shopping for its shoppable ads, according to Sarah Harms, VP of advertising marketing and measurement at Roku.
“We actually find that people would rather shop with our remote than doing a QR code, just because it’s so easy and [it’s] a minimalistic approach,” she said.
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Roku has also worked to develop its shoppable ad offering through a partnership with Shopify. Through the partnership, Shopify merchants can buy Roku Action Ads, which can send viewers a text with information about products or QR codes that viewers can scan to shop. Through those ads, viewers can buy items using Roku Pay, the streamer’s payment platform. Shopify merchants can also connect their storefronts to Roku through its platform, Roku Ads Manager.
Like NBCU, Roku has seen particular interest in shoppable ads from CPG and retail categories, Harms said.
Given the current economic uncertainty, Harms told Marketing Brew that she anticipates advertisers may look for ad products that have “known performance.”
This year, Roku has focused on expanding shoppable ads across FAST channels and other live programming, Peter Hamilton, senior director of ad innovation at Roku, previously told Marketing Brew in January; Roku’s shoppable ads are currently available across Roku Originals and its home screen, among other places, according to Harms. Expect to see more interactive ads in the future: placing Action Ads across Roku’s video offerings is a “roadmap item” for the company, she said.
Slow and steady
Despite industry interest in shoppable ads, the tech still has a long way to go before it becomes second nature for consumers, according to Bryan Quinn, president and co-founder of Shopsense AI, a retail media platform designed for broadcasters and streamers.
“The reality is, we’re still in the very early innings, to use a baseball analogy, and there’s going to be a lot of learning,” he said, noting that “the average QR code is probably only going to be scanned around a tenth of a percent of the time.” He’s hopeful, though, that “over the next one, two years, it’s going to continue to progress quite a bit. I think the technologies that are available to power that are going to take massive leaps as well that will coincide with the growth.”
But interest from media giants in tapping into shoppable options is on the rise. In February, Shopsense AI partnered with Canada’s Bell Media to build a shoppable storefront featuring a slew of The White Lotus product collabs in one place, and it worked with Tubi to develop shoppable ads around the Super Bowl. ShopSense AI also developed a shoppable storefront for Paramount for the CMT Music Awards preshow last year.
It now also has over 1,250 retailers on its platform, and debuted an agentic AI platform last month to help speed up the storefront-building process, according to Quinn.
Heading into upfronts season, Quinn said he anticipates even more interest in ad formats that more explicitly look to drive purchases—like shoppable ads.
“The ability to connect content to commerce in the lower funnel really positions broadcasters well heading into an upfronts cycle where there’s a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace,” he said.