Roku is no Netflix, but it’s no underdog either. The streamer and smart-TV company posted $881 million in revenue in Q1, a 17% YoY increase, according to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings, and its video advertising revenue has grown faster than overall platform revenue.
As the company looks to keep scaling, it has been building up its ad-tech offerings. The company, which opted out of hosting a traditional NewFronts presentation this year, is now leaning on its programmatic capabilities to appeal to advertisers navigating a difficult economic landscape, Roku execs said during the company’s Q1earnings call.
“If we look at our execution over the last two years, it’s really positioned our business…to navigate environments like we’re seeing now with the macro-uncertainty,” Anthony Wood, Roku CEO, said. “We’ve really diversified our revenue streams; we have more diversified ad products, and we’re less reliant on M&E.”
Share the wealth: Roku has been moving away from being “more of a walled garden” to making its data more accessible through third-party ad-tech integrations, Sarah Harms, Roku’s VP of advertising marketing and measurement, told Marketing Brew. To that end, the streamer inked measurement deals with iSpot in April 2024 and, more recently, Incrmntal (which is, you guessed it, an incrementality measurement platform) in February. In January, Roku introduced its Data Cloud product, which allows advertisers to access Roku viewer preference data when making inventory buys through Roku Exchange, which itself is linked to several DSPs.
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The partnerships all point to a bigger goal. Amid “economic volatility,” Roku execs are hoping advertisers will view CTV as a performance channel, and measurement partnerships are a key part of getting advertisers to see that, Harms said.
“Data Cloud is really just…tying a bow around any of our data applications or assets: making our data available to a holding company for planning or measurement, but also exploring deeper partnerships with a measurement company to share data to improve their methodology,” she said.
On the earnings call, Wood echoed Harms’s message, telling analysts that advertisers tend to look for performance during times of economic uncertainty. Roku’s home-screen marquee video unit, for example, has been popular with advertisers looking for performance buys, Charlie Collier, Roku Media president, said on the call.
Less is more? While Collier said on the call that the company is seeing advertisers shift spend from “longer-term guaranteed commitments to shorter-term, nonguaranteed campaigns, usually executed programmatically,” execs emphasized that they believe Roku is well-positioned to deal with headwinds, largely thanks to its ad-tech investments.
“Over the past couple years, we’ve focused on building our programmatic capabilities, and that investment is absolutely paying off in an environment like this that demands agility,” he said.