Streaming into the Future

About the Guest

Jordan Rost leads marketing for Roku’s advertising business. He and his team help marketers understand shifting media behavior, re-imagine storytelling for the Streaming Decade, and make better ads. Before joining Roku, Jordan held leadership roles at Google, Nielsen, Adaptly, and Accenture.

Connect with Jordan Rost

Key Takeaways

• More people spent time streaming TV than watching it on traditional television last year.
• Streaming is a fragmented landscape with many choices for streamers and advertisers.
• Streaming TV reshapes the business model of entertainment as people move away from traditional TV.
• Advertisers are questioning the role of traditional TV and digital/social media.
• TV streaming has brought TV back to the epicenter of culture and is exciting to watch evolve.
• Streaming is changing the traditional B2B marketing playbook.
• Logging in allows advertisers to understand the audience’s behavior across different devices.
• B2B marketers can reach precise measurable audiences on TV.
• Specific measurable reach opens up interesting storytelling opportunities.
• Marrying first-party data with third-party data enables more segmented audiences.

Quote

“Streaming presents a combination of great premium storytelling and precision measurement, making it an exciting frontier for marketers.” – Jordan Rost

Highlights from the Episode

Could share with our listeners a bit about your role and core focus areas at Roku?

Jordan Rost is the head of ad marketing at Roku. In this role, he focuses on marketing to marketers and promoting the company’s three main businesses. These include powering TVs in 70 million homes, advancing streaming services like Netflix and the Roku Channel, and helping advertisers engage with these services. Rost’s core focus is to help companies make the most of the unique opportunities provided by streaming, through B2B marketing efforts. He aims to assist companies in connecting with new audiences, conveying their messages, and telling unique stories through the platform.

Could you give our listeners some insight into the streaming landscape?

According to Jordan, the streaming landscape has evolved tremendously in recent years. It was once considered fragmented, but now offers a range of choices for streamers, including a variety of services and devices. For advertisers, there are numerous opportunities to buy into streaming TV and measure its effectiveness. The shift towards streaming TV is part of the larger changes in media and technology around the world, as people reevaluate their traditional TV viewing habits. The rise of social media usage and vertical video has also had an impact on the advertising landscape. TV streaming combines the benefits of both traditional TV and digital, offering both great premium storytelling and precision and accountability. It has become a central part of the culture and marketers and storytellers are taking advantage of the opportunities it presents. Consumers are also exploring new content and it’s exciting to see how the landscape will evolve in the future.

What do you think the future of television looks like, specifically streaming?

It is believed that streaming TV has become mainstream and will continue to evolve in the future. The fastest-growing segment of streaming is ad-supported streaming, which may potentially overtake subscription viewership in the next two years. Marketers are shifting their focus from acquisition to smarter, sustainable retention and lifetime value. There has been a lot of discussion about measuring the impact of streaming, with a shift towards a portfolio-based approach that focuses on outcomes. Sports and other cable-friendly content are pushing the shift of traditional brand and performance marketing into streaming. Streaming allows for new experiences and ad formats, which will likely be taken advantage of by brands in the future. The format of traditional TV ads is being shaken up with the introduction of interactivity and creative uses of smaller ad loads, making it possible for brands to tell new stories.

Could you throw some light on some of the new types of Ad experiences that are only possible in streaming?

Jordan highlights the potential for new types of advertising experiences in streaming. Three main areas of exploration have significant scale and impact on brands. Firstly, brands can be part of the content discovery experience. As an example, TurboTax has partnered to bring together different ways to watch college basketball during March Madness and provides utility to streamers by bringing all the information together in one place, without disrupting the experience. Secondly, brands are becoming part of the shopping experience by making television advertising more shoppable. Through a partnership with Walmart, ads can be made shoppable on the TV screen, and viewers can put the items mentioned in the ad into their shopping cart right from the TV screen. The conversion rate to put products in shopping carts is ten times higher when advertisements use the click of a remote button compared to a QR code. Lastly, streamers want natural experiences that fit the flow of streaming and add to the experience rather than distract from it. The innovation in ad experiences in streaming will continue to harness the control that streamers have over what they see and what they do as a result.

What does that business-to-business marketing playbook look like and how does that play into streaming?

The B2B marketing playbook has changed with the advent of streaming TV. Traditional TV advertising was not specific enough for B2B marketers to target a narrow audience, but with streaming, everything that B2B marketers have learned from digital and social media can be applied to TV. B2B brands can use first-party data to reach specific audiences with television advertising, for example, for recruitment purposes. The ability to use data and modeling to find similar audiences based on what they are streaming or other behavioral signals makes it possible to hone in on a specific target audience. With the use of ad platforms, B2B marketers can not only reach precise audiences with television advertising but also reengage them on mobile or desktop devices. By logging users in and understanding who they are, B2B advertisers can create powerful storytelling capabilities. This is how many leading B2B advertisers are using the platform, which offers the ability to reach large, big audiences around key moments, as well as precise, specific, and measurable reach.

How are you and your organization adapting to the current economic downturn?

In response to the current economic downturn, organizations and marketers are taking a close look at their strategies and determining what is and isn’t working. The impact of the economic environment is not consistent across all businesses and as a result, the responses vary. Marketers in large brand organizations are evaluating their investments in traditional linear TV and considering a shift towards more accountable channels, such as TV streaming. Performance and direct-to-consumer advertisers have built their businesses on social platforms, but are now seeking new growth channels as these platforms have become less measurable.

TV streaming is attracting attention as a potential growth channel. There is a push for accountability, cohesion, and collaboration in the marketing industry, as all parties are working together to make the most of their efforts. Publishers are eager to partner with companies like Roku to distribute their content and services through streaming and make them more accessible to consumers and advertisers. Overall, the key themes in the marketing industry are accountability, cohesion, and collaboration, with an emphasis on finding ways to work together to achieve success.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

A book:  

• Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari
• Plain English by Derek Thompson

Shout-outs

• David Eilenberg – Head of Content at Roku Media
• Derek Thompson – Writer and Editor at The Atlantic
• Rick Rubin – Music Producer