With viewership increasing rapidly on its ad-based platform, and lacking tools to effectively measure it, Roku said it is partnering with 11 research companies to count eyeballs across the entire “marketing funnel.”
Included in the Measurement Partner Program are Nielsen, comScore, ResearchNow, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Acxiom, Experian, Oracle Data Cloud, Kantar, Placed, Factual, and Polk.
While no individual research company has delivered entirely on what marketers say they want when they advertise on an OTT platform—the kind of granular data you get when you market through, say, Google—each of these entities has expertise in the texture of at least one portion of the proverbial elephant.
Currently, OTT platforms command only around $2 billion of a U.S. television advertising budget worth about $70 billion annually.
Related: Roku: ‘We Now Uniquely Deliver 10% of Adults 18-34’
“As OTT becomes a larger share of their annual ad spend, brands are actively seeking trusted third-party measurement,” said Dan Robbins, director of ad and programming research for Roku. “Roku is committed to providing an open ad platform that ensures marketers have a wide variety of tools and standards to benchmark against.”
Roku reported a 57% spike in revenue in the second quarter to $156.8 million, with the company now getting the lion’s share of its money now from advertising as opposed to device sales.
“I think the big takeaway for us is this is really the first year in which advertisers are proactively planning for OTT as part of their annual TV spending plan,” said Scott Rosenberg, general manager of platform business for Roku, speaking during his company’s August earnings call. "Roku now uniquely delivers 10% of adult 18 to 34. So if you're planning against that critical demo, you’ve got to include OTT in your planning process. (Quote provided by Seeking Alpha.)
As an example of how Roku is working with its research partners, the company pointed to a Jack in the Box campaign that ran on its platform. According to partner Placed, the campaign drove more than 164,000 store visits from December 2017 to February 2018, with 43% of those visits coming from new customers.
