At a star-studded NewFront presentation Tuesday, Roku rolled out fresh lifestyle shows being cooked up by Martha Stewart and promised more data for marketers through a partnership with Microsoft.
Roku announced co-production deals with Marquee Brands and Milk Street Studios to develop seven original series starring Stewart, Emeril Lagasse and Christopher Kimball for The Roku Channel.
Stewart has three shows: Martha Cooks, Martha Gardens and Martha Holidays (working title) Lagasse has two shows, Emeril Cooks and Emeril Tailgates, in which he’ll travel to NFL cities to find the best pre-game grub.
Kimball is whipping up Milk Street’s Cooking School and MIlk Street’s My Family Recipe.
In addition to the original shows, the deal also brings The Roku Channel library content with shows including Martha Bakes (seasons 1-11), Martha Stewart’s Cooking School (seasons 1-5), Martha Stewart Living (seasons (1-11), Essence of Emeril (seasons 1-11), Emeril Live (season 1-19) and Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television (seasons 1-5).
Roku will also be cooking up some fresh data for advertisers with Microsoft.
“We're excited to announce an industry-first partnership with Microsoft for the first time, you'll see how tv ads, both linear and streaming influence search and online browsing behaviors,” said Dan Robbins VP of Marketing & Partner Solutions at Roku,
He said Roku will be matching data from its streaming platform with Microsoft Audience Intelligence, which is fed by more than 7 billion searches per month via Bing.
“We're shining a light on search so you can see around marketing corners like never before. And it's all powered by our ad tech stack built for streaming,” Robbins said.
“We see so many synergies between the two companies and the two of us together. We feel that we can really bring value to the whole ad measurement conundrum,” added Lynne Kjolso, VP of Microsoft’s global advertising business team, speaking via video.
“We know that the lack of ability to consistently measure across channels is a barrier for marketers in really doing cross-channel planning and execution,” Kelso said. “And so we think through our partnership we can help marketers solve that problem and we're going to bring the data and bring a lot of great Insights so that we're no longer acting on assumptions. We really see it in the cold hard facts.”■
