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Limited Supply
S15 E11: How TV is Working for DTC Brands (with Jeff Katz, Head of Emerging Sales at Roku)
00:45:48
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at Nick Co Email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. If you're a Shopify brand, pay attention. Roku Ads Manager is built for growth marketers and makes connected TV way easier to test. Go to advertising.roku.com Ltd. Supply all right, Jeff, welcome to Limited Supply. Excited to have you here.
- [00:54]
B
Yeah, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Nick.
- [00:56]
A
We don't normally get the business side of the platforms that we work with, so it's always fun to get somebody like you on and help break down what's actually happening at the companies that we hear marketing in our space and you know, trying to talk to the marketers. So I'm excited to dive into that. Before we jump in, can you give us just a quick background on yourself? Kind of like how would your mom brag about you at a dinner party this weekend?
- [01:21]
B
Well, it depends how long your podcast is because my mom is quite proud of me so I'll try and I'll try and limit this. But I think it's interesting for me to be here and being on with the, with the D2C guy because most of my career I've spent primarily on the enterprise side and working with the largest media companies and holding companies in the world, really big brands like in the automotive space, restaurant space. And I feel like I've sold pretty much everything in our industry with the exception of print and won't bring up print because I don't know if that's necessarily the most relevant sell moving forward, but have been on the broadcast side, cable side, worked for Snap, so got a lot of experience on the mobile and audience first side. And then I joined Roku about seven years ago. So I guess if my mom was to brag about me and to give a plug for Roku, I now lead Ad Ad Ads Manager Sales, which is our self serve platform for the largest streaming company in North America. So it's been quite an experience and, and really partnering with more performance oriented brands that are looking for Real time results versus, you know, on the broadcast side. Back in the day it was a ton of fun selling for NBC Sports and, and, and quite an experience. But it was sort of like, hey, here's our 32nd spot. Throw it up on Sunday Night Football and, and we'll talk to you next week over drinks. So I've kind of experienced the full evolution of, of the media industry and, and hopefully my mom's proud of me with, with where I'm at right now with Roku. So.
- [02:49]
A
Yeah, and what, so like all you mentioned you sold all different ad formats maybe, except per print. So like what were some of those formats? What were your favorites? What were your, what were the ones where you were like, wow, these are the most effective or these were actually the least effective. What, what's some of the tea there? Because we never hear about the, the real stories of ad tech, you know.
- [03:08]
B
Oh yeah, well, well we could, we could, it depends how long, like I said, how long the pod is or when we meet in person, maybe off the record. But I started selling national radio and I was, I was hired as an account executive at 22, which is a bit rare in our industry. You typically come up through like the same sales assistant and sales planner route. And I happen to be hired as an AE at a company called Westwood One that essentially had all of the best rights in media, just happened to be on national radio. So things like Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, Super Bowl, Olympics, they would basically syndicate this programming across stations throughout the US So you could be listening to, you know, video music, awards content in the mid-2000s on your station in New York. Just at the same time I would hear it in Chicago and someone else would hear it in la. And it was truly a great experience because you're selling premium properties, but it's not necessarily the easiest sell in the world. And then from there went to the Big Ten network. And I was telling your producer before you joined that I grew up in the area big, Big Ten fans, the opportunity to move to broadcast and cable and sponsorship sales side of it. And I think that's really, really where you learn like the value of passion and fandom. And while certainly performance metrics or certain standard media metrics like CPMs are important, you know, sometimes aligning your brand with a passion fan base can, can truly move the needle, which I, which I think I witnessed there. From there went to NBC Sports which was similar, selling the best properties in the world, things like the Olympics and remember being in a Super bowl party and shutting up all my friends, because I sold an ad in the super bowl which was like a, which was sort of like a career milestone for me. I would say that was an interesting experience because television's gotten so much more measurable in the last 10 years. Whereas back then, not to say if something worked or didn't work, because I don't want to disparage companies that I worked at previously. But I think as you've seen with the evolution in media, just the accountability towards every one of your dollars and even things like the super bowl is really felt now. And I don't think that was necessarily the case 10 or so years ago. So from there I made a pretty hard pivot to Snapchat. And I know that you've written about Snap in a favorable way, not only in LinkedIn but also in your newsletter. I still think Snap is a bit overlooked in terms of just the valuable audience that they have as well as just the captive audience. And so there I definitely learned what ad tech meant, learned more about measure measurement. Certainly a location based app was really critical to really round out my experience. And also just the true performance nature of Snap, which I think ultimately led me to Roku, which is sort of a combination of everything I've done in the past. We used to say that Roku is the beauty of television and the brains of digital and I still think that's the case today. Just the ability to tell your story on the television screen but then also have the measurability and outcome space oriented nature of what you want to get on search and social. And so I won't say what did work and didn't work. I'll just say that I've been fortunate to sell just about everything. And even during my time at Roku we had a DSP at one point. So just the omnichannel nature of a DSP and the importance of data integrations. I've been crazy fortunate to work not only for some great companies and work for some great leaders, but just sell a bunch of different things over the last 20 years or so.
- [06:22]
A
Amazing. And you know, I. I also came up in the ad tech world, which is a funny parallel. And ad tech is what ended up driving me toward more E Comm. Related stuff because I thought most of the ad tech you grew up in, or not grew up in, but like you were working in was a lot more legit. The stuff I was doing was like programmatic advertising at some ad tech company in San Francisco that I thought was like the next big tech company and their all Their stuff was so fraudulent because it was like basically CPM arbitrage of units and you know, like 120 day view through attribution windows where it's like somebody's going to buy the thing at some point, right?
- [07:06]
B
Yeah, Attribution until death, basically.
- [07:09]
A
Yeah, exactly. But that's what ended up driving me toward more, toward the paid social and search world where even though it was this like black box, you know, there was more, it felt like there was more control over like what you were doing. But all this, all the media stuff you sold was like direct was all premium stuff. Like it was the inventory. It wasn't like any of the programmatic stuff, which is cool. But all that said, can you explain to the, to the common person, indirect consumer who has no idea how some Maybe exchanges work, DMPs work, DSPs, SSPs. Like what is a DSP and how does that play in this world of ad tech? Because I think also the framing and the understanding of how DSPs play or what they even are will help people understand how, you know, Roku as a whole also works.
- [07:57]
B
Yeah, no, that's a, that's a great question. And I will say while I was fortunate to sell for some premium, you know, publishers and companies, I still felt like we were the underdog in a lot of those places. Like being at Snap when, you know, Instagram released stories, you're like, wait a second, are we even gonna have a business? You know, now that they're, they're taking on, you know, our most important products? So I, I feel fortunate from that standpoint because I think having a bit of that under, under, underdog mentality which, which we also have at Roku, which I can touch a bit more upon. But I think what's amazing about sort of the ad space and ad tech world is the benefit of a DSP is just that omnichannel approach where, you know, if you see an ad on a television screen to sort of start the purchase journey, we know that ultimately, like even clicking with your Roku remote or whatever your television operating system might be, realistically, you're not going to make as many purchases with your remote as you are with a mobile device. And so can you start that journey as a, as a brand to tell your story on the television screen, but then ultimately retarget those people via DSP to do things like manage holistic reach and frequency so that if I know that, you know, Nick might be a high value customer, help me find more Nicks so that I can reach him with at scale. But Also ensure I'm not reaching him too many times because I think one of the most frustrating things we've all experienced not only as consumers but also on the brand side is like, if somebody already bought those shoes, why am I continuing to serve them a shoe ad? Like, we experience that a lot in our own personal day to day. So the ability to exclude audiences that have made purchases, or more importantly, finding additional customers and then balancing that frequency. Because the last thing we want is to continue getting the same ad over and over again, which especially in the streaming space, has improved a ton over the years just with frequency management and better targeting and other measurement capabilities. So the benefit of a DSP is also, I think what's really critical is telling your story in the right way based on the environment where it's showing up. How I want to see an ad or how I view an ad on a television screen versus a mobile device versus Programmatic web really differs. And so going back to my experience at Snap, like we introduced vertical video. Back then, vertical video was foreign to creative agencies or to brands. Now obviously it's commonplace here as we sit here 10 years now from, from when Snap and others were introduced. So I think that the DSP space is super interesting. I think it's going through quite a bit of challenges just based on, you know, some of the fees and the level of transparency. And so that being said, if you're a major brand that has the ability to spend hundreds, millions of dollars in advertising, it obviously might, might make sense to activate that way so that you're able to bring in your first party audience or find new customers.
- [10:37]
A
Yeah, I feel like it's almost like plugging into ad networks or exchanges, kind of like through an API, basically.
- [10:45]
B
Yeah. And we're standing up a bunch of. Yeah, for sure. We're standing up a bunch of API integrations through our self serve platform via Ads Manager. Really just making the inventory more accessible through the buying methods that customers are used to. And then also just the ability to integrate things like reporting and conversions. APIs. That's honestly one of the things I'm most excited about is being a part of Roku, is that you talk so much on your podcast, which I love about building D2C brands and how you can do things like test different types of creative. I think historically television has been really challenging to do so because you either buy on a direct IO with a firm commitment, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars. You're using a major creative agency that's producing, you know, 30 second spots or 60 second spots. And I think we're not the only ones. There's others in the self serve CTV space where you know that the minimums and point of entry is, is, is rather inexpensive and you can actually iterate and test creatives. And I feel like that's one of the biggest benefits of search and social is that, you know, there's this theory with television that you have to produce these films if you talk to these creative agencies when at the end of the day they're, you know, 15, 30 or 60 second spots. I think one of the most exciting developments in CTV and we're at the forefront of that is that let me test my creative because there's no minimums to do things like self serve platforms. Let me see, you know, did these drive certain metrics like site conversions or lead gen or ultimately roas where those metrics, previously intelligent didn't really exist. It was primarily like third party measurement tied to brand awareness and upper funnel metrics. And now we have the ability to measure last click. That's not to say that television is necessarily going to deliver last click, but I think from a view through perspective it's a really powerful medium.
- [12:28]
A
Yeah. And also like, you know, one thing people don't mention is when you have last click you have a much better reference point to understand the view through conversions as well on top of that. And you can kind of assign a score there on the API. Note, one random funny thought came to mind. Do you, are you, are you plugged into the whole open claw, Claude bot molt bot situation going on?
- [12:54]
B
Yeah, it's funny, I, I was, I was listening you talk a little bit about that too. We're not currently. But what's super.
- [13:02]
A
I just mean you as like a. Oh, an individual.
- [13:05]
B
Yeah, I use cloth. I mean, I'll, I'll just say like there are definitely certain benefits. Like, you know, I'm fortunate to lead a sales team here and I'm definitely relying on AI as far as, you know, I want to develop team focus and team principles for 2026 and these are a few of the things that I have in mind. I think I'm, I think my mother would brag about my, my writing capabilities, but certainly AI can do it a heck of a lot better than I can.
- [13:30]
A
Yeah.
- [13:31]
B
But I think there's a lot of things that obviously are going to drive efficiencies moving forward and I'm not as quite, quite as plugged in as I'd like, but I think our team is definitely utilizing a lot of AI tools that we've developed specifically at Roku to make our sales motion more efficient.
- [13:47]
A
Yeah. Well, one thing I'm hearing from brands that are, I'm talking like two $300 million plus brands is they're now starting to develop their own ad ops platforms. They're just coding them with AI. And because you have API keys, like that's all these platforms need is you just plug in the APIs of any, any of the platforms they're using to upload ads to and they're able to like rapidly generate creative, throw it out, test it, get the results and see what they, you know, end up scaling or not scaling, but the entire process just fully automated.
- [14:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I think there was obviously a lot of press around the Coca Cola ad over the holidays that was produced by like the consumer center.
- [14:30]
A
That was weird though. That was like such a bad execution of AI. That was like AI four years ago.
- [14:35]
B
Right, right. But I think you bring. We actually work with a couple of companies that are modifying search and social creative for CTV because we have a lot of customers that want to test the platform, get into television, find new audiences, ideally drive incrementality from their existing tactics. But again, so much of the barrier entry has been like, I don't have a 30 second spot to put on the television screen. And I think we're going to see more and more ads on our TV screens that look similar to what they look like in our TikTok feed. They just might be a little bit longer and you know, talking to camera, text involved. And so again, we're not the only one. So I don't want to make this only about Roku, but I think giving, giving brands the ability to buy on television that previously they weren't able to do in the past. And creative has been a barrier to entry. And to your point, not only ourselves, but we're leaning into AI companies and AI tools to democratize the actual creative generation process. And to your point, you should be able to do the same things you do on television that you do with those other platforms. Like why are you just setting and forgetting a 30 second spot that you're a big creative agency develop when you can do something that's more real time that could potentially capitalize on, you know, creative that's benefiting you in other platforms and does that work on TV or does it not work and I have to test something else. So I think that's a really exciting development because you know, previously, like I mentioned, you know, you produce a Couple spots and then you run it for the duration of your campaign and then you're done with.
- [15:59]
A
Really? Yeah. I think like when I talk to brands today, most of them are basically leveraging their E commerce, photo shoot, video shoot as their content to then go and craft a TV commercial. Like they'll grab a bunch of, you know, primary video and a bunch of B roll. Maybe they merge some stills in. Now you can sort of animate stills as well and then just adding text overlays with some music. You know, you basically got a full commercial there with a. Oh, and a voiceover too. You know, basically a full commercial. And that's cool. I think your thing is cool too where like you could put a social ad in the platform and then it spits out a, a TV ready ad as well. And it also like, it doesn't make it feel unnatural either. Like, you know, when you see it on tv it feels like a totally natural ad. There was these years where TV creative was very uniform. It was like, oh, all if it's tv it has to be this level. And then it started to, you know, there was a lot of just experimenting and now it's like you have random as seen on TV stuff. You have very polished stuff. You have only motion graphics which at this point can just be done, you know, by a brand using AI. You've got like YouTubers jumping on and holding a camera in front of them talking to you. Like there's just all these different formats.
- [17:16]
B
Yeah, I think it's exciting too because it, it should feel different, you know, like it totally have to be the 30 after 30 after 30 or 60s and 90s with all the, with all the pharma brands running and you know, so what's so powerful about the brands that you've worked with or the company that you've stood up? Is that some of these brands that we wear on our feet or on our wrists or that we're utilizing in our homes, like we had no idea what these companies were a few years ago and then suddenly because of the six success they, they found on, you know, places like Tick Toc, TikTok or Instagram or I even point back to like the Allbirds example. They built their business on Instagram. We're obviously hoping to do the same for television. I think it's going to be a little bit different ultimately because again, the odds of you buying a pair of shoes on your television screen versus within your Instagram feed are probably not quite as high. But I think where we're seeing some success which is interesting is more like high value purchases, things that require a little bit more consideration like booking a trip or a mattress or we're doing really well with furniture companies. But I think what's so powerful about search and social is that based on the level of data they have, it's like that shows up in your feed because they know you just went on a ski trip. Which is what happened to me recently.
- [18:30]
A
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. I think like TV is always such a natural next step after they figure out what works on a social and search standpoint and like find that product market fit. Because that sales cycle is already extremely hard to track. On search and social, like you can't really get, you know, you have to basically just run incrementality level measurement to really understand like is this channel even working? But with TV it sort of helps accelerate that process. And I've even worked with a mattress company in the past where TV was something that did accelerate their path to purchase because it just legitimized the brand a lot more as well. How do you, like, how do you kind of pitch TV to brands that are basically scaling on social and search and you know, they're like, well, tv, you know, social and search is like we, we see the dollars right there.
- [19:22]
B
Right. I'd love for your perspective as far as like, you know, what these brands think about television or even how you position it to them. You know, it's. To me it's interesting because like I said, my, my career historically has been the inverse. It's like we're going to start with tv. We want to get our brand on the screen, we want to tell our story, then we want to retarget them with search and social or you know, it's a television first strategy. And I think as we all know at this point, you got to have an omnichannel strategy once you hit a certain threshold. And I would say for us like the biggest value not only for Roku, but also television in general is that incrementality. Like at some point you're probably going to scale or hit your scale on those search and social platforms or the auction could become more challenging in terms of finding your audience because there's density there or there's similar products that are trying to do the same thing that you are. And so I think a lot of the conversations that we're having is the ability to tell your story on the biggest screen at the home. You know, the mobile viewing experience is typically done one to one, whereas with televisions we know There's a lot of co viewing because you're sitting around with multiple people. I think the benefit is that you're not getting lost in the, in the algorithm of a YouTube or a meta, for example. And of course those businesses are incredible. So no, no shade towards them. But I think the opportunity to really stand out in front of your audience and tell, you know, present your brand in a 30 second format or 15s or whatever you decide to do so versus, you know, if I don't show up in your feed, I might not find you. But I think the other benefit is that we do have the capabilities from a targeting perspective. With Roku having 100 million active accounts and you know, half of all streaming households utilizing Roku, we have such robust audiences that we can scale, whether it's a local customer or you know, we work with a company that wants to reach household income of 500k plus and we can scale that audience too. So I think a lot of it starts with incrementality and ultimately just some level of education that, you know, we're not going to have the same, you know, CAC or CPA that you're going to find on search and social. But if you look at the view through attribution or to your point earlier, how these, how these platforms can play with one another, like your television experience can help boost ultimately, you know, your cost per acquisition or roas that you're finding through other channels. And so I think there's been a fair amount of education which frankly I find a ton of fun. Like I've been with Roku, as I mentioned, over seven years and so much of our role back then was just educating people on streaming and now we're past that point because, you know, the amount of time spent streaming actually surpasses broadcast and cable and if you stripped out sports, the numbers would be even that much more disproportionate towards streaming. And so I think the benefit we have is like people understand streaming, they do it themselves and now it's okay. Why is streaming valuable or CTV valuable to you in addition to the channels that you're accustomed to utilizing already?
- [22:13]
A
Yeah, totally. You mentioned a couple interesting things like I would have never thought about like multiple people sitting around the screen versus one to one viewing. And there was something you mentioned right before that too. All just really, oh, getting lost in the algorithm. Another interesting one too. Shopify Brands. This is the one Roku Ads Manager lets you connect directly to your Shopify store and run streaming TV campaigns that can drive action, not just Awareness. Roku's positioned this as a big differentiator, shoppable TV through action ads and their Shopify integration. If you want top of funnel on the big screen with a proper path to purchase, go to advertising.roku.com Limited Supply. But yeah, for me, like, whenever I talk to brands about tv, like I was telling you before, my background is mainly around customer acquisition, of course, customer retention and like, you know, building brand. But mainly it's customer acquisition. And the way that I learned ad channels or like, learned platforms or even, you know, how do you. How you do brand marketing has always kind of been through the lens of customer acquisition. And so when I first actually ran tv, it was probably nine years ago, and it was at this brand called Hint Water. And we had to run it because we hit a point of diminishing returns on Facebook. Once we hit about a million bucks in spend per month, our CAC just basically only went up. So it was like, okay, well, we're exhaust. We're exhausting whatever we're reaching here. We need to go and sprinkle awareness in new places. And so one of the most efficient things we thought was, well, let's just go buy some remnant inventory and put up a commercial and see where that goes. And then if that, you know, shows, like, signs of working, then we can move it over and buy more premium placements. But like you said before, it was like all iOS and it was like a $60,000 IO, our first one. $100,000 to shoot the commercial.
- [24:20]
B
Yeah.
- [24:22]
A
And then. And then it was like waiting. It was a waiting game for a while of just even realizing if it worked. But then we were running. We were like one of the first brands to ever use this partner called Measured. They're like an incrementality partner.
- [24:36]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [24:37]
A
So it was right when Trevor was starting the company, and I think we were like client one or two. But we immediately saw that our TV was very clearly helping our. Not only our retail sales and, like, the retail buyers being extremely happy, but it was very clearly helping Facebook and Google. And so, you know, when I left, we were spending a million on digital and a million on basically TV podcast influencers. That was kind of like the top of funnel. And so for me, TV has always been basically like, oh, either if you're going to leverage it as you're scaling like crazy, then it's the best way to basically, like, pave the road before you drive on it. So you have a smooth drive with your lower funnel channels. But TV also can be Used as a lower funnel channel. Like how players like you can do retargeting, for example, and make it more of like an aggressive play versus just a sprinkling up front. There's another brand I work with, supplement brand, they just had a big product launch and so they spent, you know, they did 100k of a TV buy to basically kind of do the same thing, just sprinkle awareness. So in their case it was less performance focused. But we are now seeing those benefits on the Google and Facebook side as well.
- [25:57]
B
Yeah, no, that's, that's. I think you bring up such a good point that, you know, my career evolution is a good example. It's like it used to be all direct IO. It's hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the media. Then it was hundreds of thousand dollars to produce a creative, maybe get one or two spots and then you're like, oh, let's see what our MMM results are like three months later. And on the sales side, that was frustrating too because you're like, we want to know if it worked as well and to wait for some. And by the way, MMM has all other factors baked into it, like if you're a cbg, like, what if your packaging was poor? What if, you know, obviously there's much larger macroeconomic factors going on currently that that could impact sales. And it's like, so you added my one channel and you're telling me it's my fault that your product didn't sell? You know, I think now you mentioned measured. We work with other third party measurement companies like Incremental and House. House. I was screwed up. H A U S House. I screw up.
- [26:48]
A
I know, I never know if it's House or Hoss.
- [26:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, exactly. German or whatever. And so not only third party providers that are measuring faster, but we can do it in the platform. So when you are in Ads Manager, you get real time reporting through our conversions API. You can send us through conversion data. You mentioned audience targeting. Like we're not the only ones, by the way, that do this stuff. So I want to make it clear it's not just about Roku. It's just the ability for, for brands at their fingertips to be able to understand. Like, did you actually drive any sort of outcome for me or do I have to wait three months later for you to tell me or someone else to tell me if something actually happened or not? So I love the analogy you made about how television can kind of pave the road. And I think that's where, you know, having an omnichannel approach is so important and just also recognizing, like, what you want to get out of each channel. Like, I think one of the. One of the difficulties we face sometimes at Roku is letting perfect be the enemy of good. To your point, you could use television for upper funnel, could be for consideration, it could be for lower funnel. And I think the folks that are trying to do all the things, sometimes it's a little bit hard because then they might not have the right expectations or we might not even know the most appropriate way to set up their campaign. So I think your background's super interesting and the fact that you. It seems like you played a lot in the sandbox with a lot of these platforms too, and I think that's where it's so much fun to be on the brand side or on the agency side, is that it's no longer prohibitive to play around with tv. You know, you can come in and spend a couple grand and see if something worked for you or if that creative was favorable. Or to your point, did it actually boost the number of sell sales that I made through my channels on Instagram or TikTok, for example?
- [28:27]
A
Totally, yeah. How. How do you see like, like. Or actually a different question, like, why, like, everybody watches streaming, right? Like, why is it not a more obvious place to put ads? Like, for example, I remember when I launched a sunscreen like eight years ago, my first thought was, oh, everybody has AirPods now. We should just. We should get on podcasts, because that's where. That's basically where everybody's attention is. I feel like it's so obvious that streaming is like, what. I mean, everybody spends at least, what, one to four hours a day in front of their TV by the time they're just chilling in the evening.
- [29:05]
B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
Or it's on in the background in some way. Like, I don't understand why TV is not a more obvious channel for spending.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I. I would ask you too, because you work with a lot of D2C brands. I would say for us and in general, I mean, television obviously still comprises a huge share of spend, especially on linear. If you think about, you know, the most recent Olympics and Super bowl and some of those bigger events, I would say, I think where Roku has benefit is that our video is really performant. So if you look at about half of all programmatic CTV ad calls come through a Roku TV or device. So just the scale that we have, like, even if you're watching a show on Hulu, we might not have been the ones that sold you that ad on Hulu. But about half the viewership for programming on Hulu or Peacock or other streaming apps comes through a Roku television or device. Like we're the third largest operating system in the US which is wild. That's crazy behind iOS, iOS and Android. And I think some of it is like we're still telling that story especially
- [30:02]
A
behind iOS and Android. Not just TV operating systems.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah, yeah, we're the number one TV operating system by, by a lot, A lot. And I think some of it is like we need to do a better job telling that story. We're a little bit more humble, I think is.
- [30:15]
A
Yeah, I had no idea. That's a crazy stat. Crazy stat.
- [30:18]
B
It's awesome. But I also use it when I'm like hiring people and, and that's like ahead of Amazon and Sony and LG and Samsung and obviously like these massive tech companies. And so I think you bring up a really good point like why streaming doesn't have as much. And I think it's just you're, you're a better, you're better to, to speak to this than I am. But just the ease of use with those self serve platforms. Like I could, I could use my iPhone, I could shoot, you know, like a sunscreen bottle, I could throw out, throw it up on Meta and, or you know, or, or YouTube and it's like so easy to do. And I think that's where like we're excited and, and bullish about our Seltzer platform. And again there are others where like the ease of use of television now and I think there is some, some adoption to that that needs to take place where it's yes, those other channels are important but did you know like you could do this just as easily on television? You could bring in your first party data. Our Ads Manager tool looks like very similar to Facebook's Ads Manager and other Ads Manager tools where ideally the television buying and activation experience feels very similar to those search and social platforms. And so yeah, I think that's one of the primary reasons why we built our self serve is because you know, we're doing well with the large enterprise brands and independent agencies that want to buy programmatically or through a direct IO. But there's this huge subset of customers in the SMB space that want to buy the same way that they've historically bought, you know, on search and social.
- [31:49]
A
Yeah, what, what kind of brands do you see like come and find success?
- [31:53]
B
Yeah, that's a good question. We, it's actually a really cool case study, primarily because it involved Jennifer Aniston. But we worked with Lola V, for example, which is a big, you know, hair care D2C brand. And they were one of our first big D2C brands to work with us. And they primarily came to us, you know, originally for awareness purposes and why you'd historically utilize television. And that's a really good success story. And it's a publicly facing case study that we utilize where, you know, they saw a 40% lift in overall sales during the campaign and most importantly, they, they saw a 53% increase in new customers year over year. And so I think that's an area where so much of, where television and CTV specifically can help is with incrementality. In a past life, I led our restaurants vertical and we had a partnership with a food delivery app. And we found that through view, through attribution, about half the customers that ultimately went into that food delivery app to buy on behalf of this restaurant were either new or lapsed customers. And so you hit on the point earlier where, you know, you just started tapping out on the audience that you, you could reach on Meta or you're going to tap out on the audience you could reach on TikTok or more importantly, it's a different audience and someone that might be in a different type of mindset when they're viewing television versus where they're, when they're scrolling through their phone, whether they're on, you know, on, on search or social platforms.
- [33:17]
A
Yeah, no, makes total sense. Yeah, I feel like the, a lot of like repeat purchase products probably do extremely well on, on the platform. Yeah, we're doing consumption, especially Omni Channel.
- [33:30]
B
Yeah, we're doing really well in the insurance space. I mean, insurance ads are all over tv. I think we all know the, the different characters from like flow from progressive or you know, the Limu. Emu.
- [33:41]
A
General.
- [33:42]
B
Yeah, yeah, the general. Yeah, there's so many of them. And I, I was actually the insurance lead at Snap and a lot of it was like always on branding because you never know when you have a life event that might trigger the need to, you know, update your policy, add to your policy. Yeah. And so some of it for us candidly is that we just can scale audiences at a significant level. So if you're in market for life insurance or car insurance, Medicare, open enrollment, we just have the ability, with having 100 million active accounts and you know, half of all streaming coming through us, it's just the ability to scale audiences. And most importantly, when, when people set up a Roku TV or device enter their first party data. So we match it with third party data providers. You create a Roku login. So we're not, you know, we're not subject to like password sharing. We, we target off the device and so it's really strong deterministic signals and we could do it at scale, which we've done on, you know, other sides of our business for a really long time. And then through our partnerships with, you know, with the various channel partners we have on the platform, we get a portion of their inventory. And then we also have our own channel, the Roku Channel, which if you were surprised that half of all streaming comes through a Roku TV or device, you'll probably be more surprised that the Roku Channel is the number one fast channel in the US and second most watched app on our platform.
- [34:57]
A
Yeah, I mean, what happens on the Roku Channel?
- [35:00]
B
Well, you'll have to find out. Exactly. It's a lot of my podcast, so thank you for, for there. No, we have, we have some of our own originally original programming. Then we have like hundreds of live channels where you can, you know, watch live television. It's like the old school, you know, TV Guide, kind of scrolling through VOD content. Content like Girl and New Girl and any other show name Girl in it. So yeah, I mean it's, it's crazy how many people watch the Roku Channel. The benefit we have is that we guide people into the Roku Channel from our home screen. So 125 people. Sorry, 125 would be bad. 125 million people see our home screen on a daily basis and so we can use those ads to drive people into the Roku channel. So it's really cool being the platform. Like this is honestly one of the most fun parts about my job is that, you know, we have that home screen, you know, inventory available and then we could also reach people with, with midstream video or mid roll videos.
- [36:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's rare that the, the ad delivery network is also the operating system.
- [36:08]
B
Yeah, for sure. But what's kind of cool is so another role of mine, I led our travel vertical. A lot of people will take their like Roku stick that they plug into their TV and travel with it because they don't want to have to like re enter their logins and passwords or pay for it. Y an audience segment of like frequent travelers because we know that they're plugging into a different like or setting up to a different wi fi, which is really cool.
- [36:33]
A
You know, when I was a kid, I remember going to like the Weston and you'd connect to WI Fi, but you'd have to go through like a separate screen gateway. And I was, when I was, when I was a kid, I was like, why wouldn't we bring like the stick with us, the TV stick with us and travel. But then I thought, oh, you can't get past the gateway. So you can get past those hotel gateways.
- [36:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, you still log in. Yeah, you still log in. But then like you have your own.
- [36:57]
A
I guess now they're built for that too.
- [36:59]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [37:00]
A
Yeah.
- [37:01]
B
Thanks for sharing your family.
- [37:02]
A
I gotta start doing that now.
- [37:03]
B
Yeah, yeah, we'll hook you up with. Yeah, you can play around with it during your worldly travels, you know.
- [37:08]
A
Yeah, that's awesome. Can you talk also a little bit about the Shopify integration? Because speaking about like being the operating system, one of the cool things is that you can literally just shop on the screen too, which is not even. It's not view through, it's not click through, it's like shop through conversions, basically.
- [37:26]
B
Yeah. I think when we design the Ads Manager self serve platform, we want to be really thoughtful about some of the integrations we've had. And so through the Roku remote, you can actually click okay to take a bunch of different actions, whether it's downloading an app, guiding yourself to a website. And so one of the first major integrations we had was with Shopify. And we thought, you know, how great would it be that you could actually shop from your television screen? So any brand that is available on Shopify, we have a direct integration where you could actually add to cart or even check out through the television screen. And again, as I mentioned previously, like the actual checkout, not a ton of that is going to happen through the Roku remote. But as long as we're starting that journey and ultimately people are going to a brand that is available on Shopify to check out is really powerful. And so what's interesting about our ad products is we've historically built them with not only the customer in mind, but we'll start with our media and entertainment partners. Because if you're watching tv, you're obviously more likely to add a channel to your mix, or buy a movie or subscribe. And so once we find success with our M and E partners, that's when we'll introduce other products to customers. And so we've seen a lot of success with various Shopify brands. I think it's definitely an area of opportunity for us and continued growth. But we feel like we're not only democratizing the ability to buy tv, but also the ability for brands that historically have partnerships with Shopify to be available on the television screen.
- [38:50]
A
Yeah. When I was setting it up, I noticed that, like, when you send that, when you get the text message from Roku, it comes from Roku. So, like, if you, if you're watching the ad and you want and you're interested, you click a button and you get a text message. And it reminded me of. There's another company here in New York called Agile. They do these billboards on the sides of delivery trucks that are just running routes anyways, but now they monetize the sides and it kind of has the same like, cosine effect that like, you know, for that it's like, oh, lolavi also did that. So for lolavy, it was like, oh, Jennifer Aniston has trucks in New York City. Like, lolavy is a very legit brand. And when you have the text come from Roku, it's kind of the same thing. It's like, oh, wait, this is a Roku affiliated company. Like, wow, that's a big deal.
- [39:36]
B
Yeah.
- [39:36]
A
And so legitimizes it to the average consumer. You know, we live in this like, bubble where we, we wouldn't see that as a thing, but it's totally a thing.
- [39:44]
B
Yeah. Well, you've. You now found the one thing I haven't sold, which is the side of trucks advertising on the side. I'll have to add that to the list. But no, I think also, like, you bring up a good point. Like, you kind of never know when you're going to catch somebody's attention too. Like you might totally. I notice, I notice.
- [40:02]
A
Yeah. It's actually an interesting point.
- [40:04]
B
I'm going to like the airport, like outdoor sports still carry value or, you know, Uber introducing ads on tablets as part of their ride. You know, when you're in the back of a ride. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [40:16]
A
Ads are everywhere. It's crazy.
- [40:18]
B
And I feel like, I don't know if you feel the same way, but now, of course, working in it, it's like unmissable. Like I like taking notes or leave myself voicemails when I see things. Just like follow up on if I saw them.
- [40:31]
A
Yeah. What I find interesting is, is the like ads, ads have always just been a part of culture. But like the amount of ads has gotten so much now that like the competition, like the standard of what is allowed as a good ad to be released into the Wild has now gone up a lot, which I think is great because consumers only have finite attention and there's only so many times, you know, you're gonna be able to catch their attention. And so I think it's. Overall, I think it's a good thing, but it totally makes like, your job harder, my job harder. You know, everybody we work with is like working 10 times harder to, to get that split second of. Oh, wait, I should, I should stare at this for another second and a half.
- [41:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, you brought up a good point. Like, I'll get at that question. Like, who's your competition? I think we're all competing for everybody's attention. Whether it's totally, you know, wherever the media might be. It's like people have a finite amount of tension and. Or you hear the analogy how we have less, you know, the attention span we have is less than a goldfish, which is, which is unfortunate, I guess. So it's like, you got a few seconds how you get in front of that customer so that they're going to choose you versus choosing somebody else.
- [41:36]
A
Totally. Yeah. I blame Reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts for that. All right, Jeff, anything else we should wrap with here?
- [41:47]
B
I don't think I actually. Can I ask you a question, or is this A1. What is A brand recently that's caught your attention? What's something that you thought was really impactful that, that you're now remembering when you're talking to someone like me?
- [42:01]
A
Ooh, man. I don't know if there's one specific brand I like to, I like to. You know, my mom always told me when I was a kid, just take the good little nuggets from everything. Don't try to like, find one thing and try to make that one the thing. So for me, like, I find I always find little things. I'm like, oh, the, the way that these guys just added, you know, the, the. A little, almost like a little ad unit in their cart to push me to subscribe versus buy one time. I really like that. I'm gonna doc. Save that. You know, the way that, oh, these guys are using influencers on a 24 hour cycle to do live stream. That's sick. I should take that, maybe suggest that to somebody. The way that these guys are running, you know, a TV meta and retail blitz is really interesting, you know, and how they tie together their TV messaging with like the landing pages you get when you're served the meta ad if you're, you know, still targeted there. So, like, I feel like I find little tidbits like that. But you know, a lot of the brands that I like to look at, you know, probably like, like Lolavy is definitely one of them. They're kind of always on the forefront in terms of E commerce. Ima. It's also a great, great one. Parachute home. A lot of different influencer brands, whether it's like a Lemmy or a POV beauty. But yeah, I just like to find, I tend to find like or I'll sometimes I'll track a growth person, you know. Oh, the growth person from eight sleep left and went to this one. I should go start to see what are they doing with their ads, what are they running on tv, what are they running for Landers. So I usually try to do it that way. Yeah, that's cool.
- [43:30]
B
No, it's so funny you mentioned the growth piece because not to say that those roles like didn't exist but it, you know, from on the sales side like in the past I'd be like, who's the VP of advertising? Who's the cmo?
- [43:42]
A
Right? Yeah, it's like VP of ads doesn't exist anymore.
- [43:45]
B
No, no. It's like find me the growth person. And I think what's so cool about those roles is like once you kind of have a playbook at one brand, it can transcend different types of brands. Because I feel like historically on, on the brand side it was like if I'm at PNG then maybe I go to General Mills and then maybe I go to another cpg. Now it's like if I'm the GM of growth for a life insurance company and I know life cycle marketing and I understand ROAS and ltv, I could take that playbook and bring it to any other brand because I know the channels, I know the type of creative, I know how to optimize and I think it's just super interesting and a huge deviation in terms of where our industry is going. Like they're running these brands like businesses. They're not running it as like how am I going to show up in a third party measurement provider to get like an initial percentage or 2 of market share. Now it's like can I help take this company public? And then I'm going to leave and go try to take another company public or get bought or whatever the case may be. Totally a huge departure from where we used to be.
- [44:45]
A
Yeah, couldn't agree more. It's also, it's like I find it to be one of the hardest roles to find consistent talent. That's like can keep backfilling other roles or like jumping to companies, but yeah. Cool man. Well, thanks for coming on. This was awesome.
- [44:58]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a ton of fun and hope to meet you in person sometime soon.
- [45:03]
A
Likewise. We'll do drinks in New York.
- [45:04]
B
Yeah, sounds great, Nick. Thanks again.
- [45:08]
A
Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg retail and e Commerce Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.