Roku has announced a new demand-side platform (DSP) for advanced advertising, OneView, a rebrand of assets acquired in November amid its $150 million acquisition of Dataxu.
Roku, which just upped its tally of active users for its OTT device ecosystem to 40 million, said OneView integrates the reach, inventory and capabilities of Roku advertising with the identity and attribution tools of DSP Dataxu.
Also read: Roku Added 3M Active Users in Q1, Approaches 40M
OneView marries programmatic ad buying with data management, media planning and attribution tools, targeting marketers participating in an OTT advertising market that’s expected to grow by 31% to $5 billion in 2020, according to Magna Global.
“Our goal is to help advertisers and content partners invest for a world where all TV is streamed,” said Scott Rosenberg, senior VP and GM of Roku’s platform business, in a statement. “OneView provides the data and scale across the entire TV landscape so marketers can plan, buy and measure TV advertising and ultimately shift spend to streaming more quickly.”
Other video companies, including AT&T and Amazon, have their own DSPs, which are used by agencies and brands to purchase ads in channels such as connected TV, display and digital audio, using automation.
Speaking to Ad Age, Jay Porpatich, senior director of growth marketing at booze delivery company Drizly, said OneView gives his company a way to measure complex channels like connected TV. The DSP even offers Drizly insight as to which viewers clicked on the company’s website after viewing an ad.
“Drizly is like a number of DTC brands that has a relatively boring mix of two behemoths—Facebook and Google—with relatively simple means of measuring those guys,” Poropatich told Ad Age. “We knew we had to diversify.
“We’re more interested in understanding the causal persuasion of an ad and whether it results in new customers,” Poropatich added. “Because we have a control audience who just sees our PSA ads on Roku, we can measure lift of an exposed individual versus a non-exposed.”
Analysts, however, wonder if the introduction of yet one more DSP, in the biggest streaming ecosystem in the U.S., will create one more “walled garden.”
“It’s starting to look like these big media companies are setting up more walled-garden style environments than not, where they can run all their own inventory through their pipes and eventually try and restrict buyers to only using their owned platforms,” said Joanna O'Connell, VP principal analyst at Forrester, also to Ad Age.
“That’s not what big buyers are going to want,” she added. “They want platforms that give them more access to more streaming inventory in a single place—this makes it harder for them to do that.”
