Shree Rajagopalan (3:03)

I miss Stu Leonards from back in my Connecticut days. It's celebration weekend at the Raj household for sure once I get back from D.C. so I do that tonight and tomorrow should be a fun day. I'm looking forward. Hopefully we can get out to the beach in Santa Monica. Who knows what the fam has planned. But one thing's for sure, it's celebration weekend. All right, so make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes even go back to consume some of the 500 plus episodes we've already published. Today's episode is focused on retail media, including new capabilities, our guest partnerships, and the overall state of retail media research and learnings. And ctv, of course. Please join us in welcoming to the podcast Jordan Raster. He leads marketing for Roku's advertising business. He and his team help marketers understand shifting media behavior, reimagining storytelling for the streaming decade, and just simply make better ads. Prior to joining Roku, Jordan held leadership roles at Google, Nielsen, Adaptly and Accenture. Let's welcome Jordan Ross to the CPG guys and joining him is our long term friend who's also been in the CPG guys. So this is his repeat appearance, Mr. Jeffrey Bustos, SVP Retail Media and Analytics at Merkle and now SVP as well. Jordan, Jeff, how you guys doing Friday afternoon? You guys ready?

Jordan Ross (4:23)

Great to be here. Nice to be the new guy here. So thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Bustos (4:28)

Excited to be back here in different capacity but continuing to measurement and retail media conversation.

Shree Rajagopalan (4:33)

All right, we're excited to have you both on the podcast Wheel, of course in the digital show. Notes on this episode include links to your LinkedIn profiles and that of both Merkel and Roku. On we go towards conversation. So I'll kick it off first with you, Jordan. You asked the latest man Roku was on this podcast approximately a year ago. What's changed? What's new? And how's the wonderful world of CTV and retail media connecting with each other?

Jordan Ross (4:56)

Yeah, it's been a busy year. Television continues to fragment and grow in lots of different directions and Roku still is kind of at the center of trying to help put that back together for audiences, for companies, for advertisers. We, we hit a big milestone this year where Nielsen actually validated that more people watch television on a Roku device than on broadcast television, which we're obviously excited about. But we think this really ushers in a new era of television that makes performance television advertising possible. It makes television much more accountable as a medium. And it's really the bedrock that underpinned a lot of the work that we've done to bring CTV and retail media together. It's what's helped us integrate with companies like Amazon and Trade Desk and ultimately help advertise advertisers take better advantage of television.

Shree Rajagopalan (5:45)

I want to try and understand that statement you made that more people watch on a Roku device versus you said streaming TV or over the air tv, cable tv.

Jordan Ross (5:57)

I'm going to correct myself already. It's actually more television hours are watched on a Roku device across all of the different range of content that we provide than all of broadcast television, traditional television as a whole. So a pretty seismic shift and one that's been, you know, years in the making as CTV and streaming become a much more mainstream behavior for more Americans.

Shree Rajagopalan (6:20)

Wow, that's indeed a momentous moment in the country when it comes to entertainment and just overall content and programming and things of that nature. When you see something like that, Jordan, what's the first reaction that comes to your mind? Are you guys, like, super excited thinking about what the next phase of streaming TV is going to be and, you know, all the work as an ad leader you're going to have to do to provide services to all your brand partners so that they can indeed leverage this momentous change in the industry.

Jordan Ross (6:50)

It's certainly an honor for us as a privilege that we earn every single day as people turn on all their Roku TVs. But we're doing this not just for us, but the streaming services that distribute their content and their services through our platform and the advertisers that get to partner with us as a result of them, that. And so we really view our role in the ecosystem as a true platform for entertainment, a platform for advertisers, and increasingly a platform for retail media companies and retail media advertisers to connect all of their great retail media activity with the largest screen in the screen in the household. And so it's a privilege more than anything, and one that we again have to earn every day by delivering a great user experience for our customers.

Shree Rajagopalan (7:35)

So, Peter, does it mean in the world of broadcast and entertainment, there are no more Luddites?

Peter Vs. Bond (7:40)

Get it?

Peter Vs. Bond (7:41)

I get that. Sri, your avid use of the word luddite, since I introduced it into your vocabulary once an episode is admirable, I'll give you that now I'll profess. By the way Jeff and Jordan, welcome to the podcast. We are a multi device Roku household here. We have one on TVs in three rooms and I and I also stream it on my from my mobile device. So the point is it's how we, it's how we, we entertain and we, we consume content. Jeff, I want to bring you in. Roku and Denso recently revealed some research on shoppable TV advertising and whether it drives success for consumer packaged goods brands. Can you tell us if content commerce integration drives engagement for brands or not?

Peter Vs. Bond (8:31)

We've seen a 96% corre between the.

Jeffrey Bustos (8:35)

Content in ads and shopper behavior, especially in driving awareness, consideration and purchase. What's really important is to have a balance in the creative of both novelty and familiarity. You want to ensure that the ads create enough excitement and engagement, but also that the consumers are trusting and feel.

Peter Vs. Bond (8:54)

That the content is sincere. Within the research we saw that there was a 30 action ads or engage ads. You know, invite consumers to engage with the ad had 30% higher brand awareness and drove 40% more, 47% more purchase intent compared to standard video ads. And a lot of this is really based on the notion that, you know, you want to make sure with these content that you're sharing with the consumer that they're receiving competitive pricing or competitive messaging or something that's relevant to them. And then the also that it brings unique loyalty programs and rewards that are only available through this TV purchase. And one of the really fun things that we developed with Roku was a sort of a framework or a matrix on the shoppable value exchange. So it's how do you balance limited time offers and bundled products or products to tie into a show or movies? And how you should be balancing price sensitivity and convenience and discovering novelty because obviously depending on what the consumer's buying, they have different propensities against price, convenience and discovery. And it's really just balancing those specific consumer intents and purchase behaviors against a specific offer or objective you have for your brand.

Shree Rajagopalan (10:11)

Awesome. I'll flip it over to Jordan. Of course you have a partnership with Amazon. Tell our audience all about what is the Roku Amazon partnership. How can advertisers benefit from this partnership, including any measurement you're bringing to the table on this partnership, which of course advertisers are going to ask all about roi.

Jordan Ross (10:31)

So I mentioned us being a massively large scale platform for television consumption that's underpinned by the fact that we're an operating system for television. And so we are the brains and the guts behind all the enjoyment and the great storytelling that happens across television. And so the partnership with Amazon is really about connecting our view of the entire consumer experience across television with their view of a connected television environment. And so it's really a match between our view of our streamers and Amazon's view of their audiences across all their different properties. And what that means in practice is as an advertiser, if you're using the Amazon dsp, you can buy across a wider range of inventory, you can manage audience engagement much more effectively because you have a holistic understanding of consumers across Roku devices and across all the other inventory that's available in the Amazon dsp. And so that's going to allow you to more efficiently reach audiences. In fact, in some of our early testing we saw that you were actually able to reach 40% more viewers because of this match. It's also going to allow you to manage the ad display across that and so you can cut down on ad repetition, better ad experience, more effective reach for the advertiser, and ultimately help you drive more ROI by managing across all this. And I think, I think the single biggest thing that this unlocks for advertisers is the ability to use all of Amazon's shopper data to more precisely target and measure the reach that you have and the effect that that's having. And so if you're a snacks brand and you really value the great Amazon data that they have around people who buy in this next category but are not buying your brand, you can use that Amazon audience data to both target new to brand customers across our entire swath of inventory, or measure the effect end, or measure the effectiveness of the reach that you could have and how that translated into winning new buyers across the category and growing your overall category share. So we're going to be going into market later this year. We're really excited for advertisers to get their hands on the more holistic view of the CTV landscape they can reach and the more effective and more efficient advertising, more accountable advertising they can deploy as a result.

Peter Vs. Bond (12:54)

Jordan, if I may, just a quick follow up. What's implicit and correct me if I'm wrong in what you said is from the audience targeting perspective and the back end on the measurement, the use of their clean room Amazon marketing cloud allows you to build those audiences, perhaps bring in some of their own first party data, intermingle that in the privacy safe environment and then on the back end be able to track those consumers that had the multi touch attribution of how many exposures and what have you and really get robust information about the consumers and even get to the point where you're measuring long term value and targeting new to brand and all the wonderful things that come with it by being part of the Amazon ecosystem. Am I correct there?

Jordan Ross (13:44)

That's correct. And so all the great capabilities that Amazon's brought to the market, those still remain in place. We view our role in that as to sort of underpin that with a much richer and broader view of the streaming ecosystem that can help augment and in many cases scale out all of the precision and addressability that Amazon's provided and enable the types of data collaborations and other use cases that you described.

Shree Rajagopalan (14:11)

I also wanted to clarify that. I asked you a question about measurement. The big exciting thing is the you use the word new to brand, incremental to brand, that's obviously been making a lot of noise in the last year. I'm not sure brands even understand what it is, but everybody's asking for it. And this new partnership, the Amazon partnership, you guys will be able to provide that.

Peter Vs. Bond (14:41)

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Jordan Ross (15:52)

Yes, and that is a playbook that we've applied across all of our retail media partnerships. In fact, through some of our early work with Instacart, we found that half of all purchases that came from an exposure based on Instacart data and Instacart measurement were new to brand. And so what we're learning at the convergence of CTV and retail media is I think that convergence allows for a wider funnel that advertisers are able to build, but one that's inherently more measurable. And more attributable. And so I think the power of this is really enabling brands to go a little bit more mass with their initial engagement but then really winnow down to just the precise audiences and then build the attribution on top of that. That's going to validate the investment. And we're really just getting started. And so I think that's the exciting part of all of it.

Peter Vs. Bond (16:45)

I'll add one last comment. I think now that Amazon has opened up its look back window from 12 and a half months to five years, the relevance for brands beyond just the fast moving consumer brands, you know, the staples that were, you know, the groceries that were it, it makes it so much more valuable to be able to actually target what really is new to brand because I think we all agree like we don't all buy a television once a year, right? So a five year window makes it much so Jeff, the CPT guys clearly consider you to be a subject matter expert in retail media measurement. You've been on our podcast a couple times. You've clearly demonstrated your street creds. How are you advising brands and even Roku on how to innovate metrics and deliver for CPG brands that are looking to succeed?

Jeffrey Bustos (17:34)

Well first off the exciting part of this partnership with Roku was them actually going the extra step and actually getting that closed loop measurement. And you know, that's something that's been really exciting to Roku. Even when I was at the IBM I wrote a paper on CTV measurement and Roku were, they're one of the first ones that they closed with measurement with Kroger. When we think about CTV and just video and awareness, obviously, you know, for a long time we've been very reliant in awareness and consideration metrics which are incredibly important. But even like GRP metrics that are just very slow and you know, with.

Peter Vs. Bond (18:06)

The rapid change of consumer behavior that Jordan mentioned, it just it's imperative that we have more advanced metrics and bringing a lot of these retail media metrics it comes to the idea of like well what is a leading indicator and the amazing thing I'm having new to brand is that you can still do a brandless study but you can bring in all these other retail media metrics and understand what is the correlation impact between these retail media metrics and brand awareness in a sale and then you can start really optimizing your video ads with retail media, your CTV ads much more efficiently instead of having to wait at the end of three months or six months for your brand Awareness study. You know that these metrics have high correlational impact to improve brand awareness or brands consideration or to drive sales long term. And obviously you know, brand awareness and consideration are important but the objective of driving increased brand awareness and increased consideration is to drive sales and bring being able to bring in that close loop measurement immediately and understand what is the impact and understand how consumers are interacting with the ad. Also helps understand how you should be optimizing creative and messaging and audience. And then when you look at new to brand, it's an incredibly important metric is because you're understanding who is new to your brand but you're also understanding the consideration on how consumers are moving from the funnel and kind of, you know, if you're buying a television, you're not buying as often but if you're buying like a CPG product or you're buying, you know, a clothing product, those things are very different because then you can start understanding like is are they new to brand, new to the category and how are the consumers and converting to drive that purchase? And the idea is that measurements should dictate decisions in the long term.

Shree Rajagopalan (19:42)

Jeff, I have to ask you on the same measurement piece on new to brand, that seems to be like the hottest metric since sliced bread. Any opinions on that? I know you and I have talked about it in a bus ride in coming back from somewhere in Cannes about a year ago, year and a half ago, but that's what I hear from advertisers all the time. I need to know new to brand incrementality, that's about the only words they use. So I think with a lot of.

Jeffrey Bustos (20:10)

Measurement we get so stuck in like new brand incrementality. And I think what we need to do is like understand the why as to why we got that metric. So if you tell someone like let's take the example of like Coca Cola and Pepsi like a lot of what drives growth for Coca Cola is purchase frequency and basket size. The new to brand metric of Pepsi is significantly smaller. Whereas for Pepsi category share, new brand and margin, those metrics have a higher.

Peter Vs. Bond (20:38)

Correlational impact to their growth.

Jeffrey Bustos (20:41)

So you know those the idea of.

Peter Vs. Bond (20:43)

Like being like what is the benchmark nude brand even within the beverage category, they're so drastically different between these two competitors. And then the what we're talking to a lot of our clients is well let's think of metrics and look at the trends of metrics and look at the correlational impact and the positive negative correlations against these metrics. So for a clothing brand we're having a conversation with. We saw that there was a positive correlation to driving traffic to the product page for awareness campaigns, that there was a positive correlation that product pages drove sales in the long term. So we optimized towards that metrics for awareness instead of just optimizing towards cheap CPMs. Now we had a metric that we knew at some point in the near future had a high propensity to converting instead of just chasing a low CPM or cpc. So I think, to quote Cara Pratt when she was at Kroger, let's move away from vanity metrics. And now that we have this closed measurement, not just within a retail ecosystem, but, you know, bring in ctv, because in the day, like, yes, we do a lot of shopping, but we all spend a significant more time being entertained with any television, with video, with social media and those close measurement is imperative to really close the loop on the consumer journey.

Shree Rajagopalan (21:59)

Let me remind our audience we're speaking with Jordan Ross from Roku and Jeff Bustos from Merkle. Jordan and Jeff, are these ads that we speak to mostly generic? Are you able to personalize it and how are consumers responding to either generic or personalized ads?

Jordan Ross (22:17)

For us, I think the answer is yes. We're sort of the end cap for livings across America. And so television's always been about big, broad reach and storytelling for the masses. And we can do that given our scale. But where I think it gets really interesting is that scale also enables you to get much more precise and individualized with your outreach and still have meaningful impact on the business. And so the research that we've done with Jeff and team actually said that 83% of people value ads that are personalized to their shopping behavior. But only a third of them actually pay more attention to those which to me says that personalization is table stakes. People expect if you're a dog owner, not to see cat relevant ads, but you have to do more than that to be truly valuable to the points that Jeffrey was mentioning earlier. And so for us, the CTV environment is so much more than video advertising. The standard 15 or 30 second spot, it's interactive, it's clickable, it's immersive, and it becomes more of a journey. And so that presents a lot of opportunities for you to start with big broad appeals quite literally on the front home screen that 125 million people see every day in America and then get much more precise with actually helping deliver value across the rest of the journey. And so we find advertisers use the home screen to be broad and culturally relevant in key TV moments, entertainment moments, but then follow up with a shoppable experience where you can find the offer that's right for you or in some cases actually find local product availability at a retailer near you. And so the personalization journey is one that is a consumer journey. And we're finding that consumers increasingly do want to be both part of mass cultural appeals, but then eventually find that right appeal or offer value for them.

Jeffrey Bustos (24:12)

Kind of digging into that, when we did that, when we're analyzing the data and we're developing the matrix, for example, we saw that when you have bundled product offers, it's important to have clear message messaging on the savings to ensure that and ensure that the purchase friction is reduced and ensure that it's a product that people are already familiar with and there's not a lot of novelty to it. Whereas, you know, if it's, you know.

Peter Vs. Bond (24:39)

Product tie ins and shows and movies, then it's a little bit more exciting there because it's, you know, price isn't such a sticking point and a lot of the in nearby there's convenience mainly because when there's a product or show tie in, the novelty aspect plays really well to the consumer. So again, it's, it's as Jordan was saying, you know, having relevancy is table stakes. I think if you just say you have relevant advertising today, I think it's, you're missing in a lot of the data signals. It's like, how can you drive that additional engagement to really drive that, you know, increased growth where we're seeing, you know, increased brand awareness of 31% or increased purchase consideration of 41% when you are, you know, going a little bit step further and using this retail data to really provide not just relevancy but key offers and messaging and audience discovery that's imperative for the future of commerce.

Shree Rajagopalan (25:32)

I got a question for you. What do you do with a household who has both cats and dogs?

Jordan Ross (25:39)

And we'll figure out which is your most favorite child after that. So sure, we'll get to work on that.

Peter Vs. Bond (25:44)

Yeah, you send different messages. The problem is figuring out which person in the household is watching and which pet they prefer. That is something if you can figure that out. Jordan. I sense a lot of success in business.

Shree Rajagopalan (26:01)

But, but Jordan, the Raja's all can be a great subject for you. We have three cats and a dog.

Peter Vs. Bond (26:07)

Yeah, yeah. In any event, Jordan, listen, the other night we just put our daughter to bed and my wife and I sat down to, to relax and I said, what do you Want to watch? And she said, well, why don't we let Roku decide? She goes, the city usually gives us something interesting. And what she was referring to is Roku City, which is the scrolling landscape of the city. And it shows to me how, you know, just even before I've watched my show, there's messaging that's coming my way. So I'm incredibly impressed with the ability of your platform to engage consumers. So to that end, what role does content provide in engagement and attribution? And how do you work with brands to actually ensure that they are getting ROI out of their investment?

Jordan Ross (26:55)

It's funny you mentioned that example. We view our user experience as the lead in to television today in the same way and still massive sports properties become the lead in to the show after them because people forget to turn the TV off or whatever the case may have been. Our user experience, our home screen, the screensaver, Roku City is really the surrounding frame and the lead in to all the great content that exists across the TV landscape. And so we encourage advertisers to in some ways pull their advertising out of the spot and bring it into the user experience so that you could be as a brand part of the whole content journey. We worked with a large soft drinks brand who was really focused on advertising into the food content category. And so in addition to, you know, running targeted video ads across key category buyers based on shopper data that they had in food relevant content, they also brought some of the creative from their video advertising right onto our home screen. It was influencer oriented content. And so in many ways content integrations can live outside of content because of the advent of a user experience where advertising participates. And not only is that more rich story storytelling, we actually found that that did, per our prior discussions, lead to some pretty significant incremental sales because of again that widening funnel that the content was able to meet before someone jumped into a streaming service that doesn't have advertising where that brand couldn't participate. And so we view the advent of a user experience as the lead into television as a really interesting way for that engagement and the attribution that can follow from that to really have a much wider canvas and with all the data that the entirety of retail media can bring to bear to make that attributable and accountable, it really is a nice expansion of what TV can mean to an advertiser's mix.

Shree Rajagopalan (28:56)

And so Jeff, I want to flip that question over to you as well. The same one which is content. What is Merkle, in your view on the measurement of content, the quality of the content and the outcomes it gives, which is attribution. How do you all approach this?

Jeffrey Bustos (29:11)

Yeah, I mean I think first of all is you want to make sure you have enough data to get to be able to measure it. And I think a really awesome thing when working with the Roku team was that they and just with any partner is ensuring that you're making it as easy as possible for someone to shop within a TV environment. So like having someone scan a QR code works sometimes.

Peter Vs. Bond (29:33)

But like you know, Tuesday night, 10pm, you're eating, you know, you know, you're eating fries, you had a stressful day, you're not going to scan a QR code. You want to be able to just click and buy. So it's like, you know, how do you identify consumer and reduce any sort of barrier and make it as convenient as possible for the consumer? Or if you need, if you need their email, you need some sort of Legion. Roku already has that consumer's email so that that could be sent directly to the consumer. So I think it's really understanding how can I get as few control clicks or photos as possible to that consumer purchase or lead gen, whatever the objective is, I think that's imperative because once you make that easy and once you get more consumer volume driving that, then the measurement part becomes much easier. You have enough measurement to be able to make decisions. And when you start looking at measurement, the exciting thing is that we can now measure things more than just GRPs, brand awareness or consideration. You can start understanding how different audiences, how are performing against different products or SKUs and messaging and start optimizing creative a bit more efficiently, especially within a CTV context where you maybe not be able to know what the click rate is because it's a CTV mid roll. Or you might see the skip you're able to optimize based on other metrics or what we're calling leading indicators. And it's a lot of these new metrics that CTV platforms are able to roll in with these retailers and these data partnerships that they have. I think that's where we're going to see a lot more investment in video, especially as E commerce continues to grow consumers. You know, the store is still a really large place because consumers want to see how the product looks like, how it feels and everything. And what was exciting is that we're seeing that ctv, a lot of CTV players are bringing that interaction to the screen. And I think those are the things that are going to be imperative for consumers to buy more E Commerce because you can make the E Commerce purchase experience as easy as possible. But if you don't bring the experiential feel of shopping into the living room, then there is going to be like a cap to how much that growth will continue.

Shree Rajagopalan (31:41)

On the lines of growth for the last, let's say, year and a half, two years now. Volume in the CPG industry has been pretty hard to get for brands because price sensitivity is impacting brand outcomes. So how can brands use this unique ecosystem to reach very specifically the value driven shopper?

Jordan Ross (32:01)

I would say from our perspective, the rise of free ad supported television has directly coincided with that phenomenon that you're talking about, sree, and it's really helped a lot of advertisers accelerate their investment into ctv not just to reach the value driven shopper, but we're finding that all shoppers are increasingly value driven in some way. And so we're constantly trying to help advertisers reach those that subscribe to streaming services but do so in and out of services because they're constantly canceling and turning, which can, as an advertiser make it hard to know exactly where to find that audience. Because one month they're in Peacock, but then their show goes away. So they jump over to HBO Max. And so that's, I think, been a boon for ctv, but it has added to the fragmentation as the value oriented shoppers are increasingly churning in and out of services. But again, I think that's the role that we want to play is to help advertisers and all of our partners still find where that shopper goes or that streamer goes from month to month, regardless of what service they're in.

Shree Rajagopalan (33:10)

Jeff, any opinions on that?

Jeffrey Bustos (33:12)

Yeah, I think, you know, any sort of, you know, technology or player that is able to, you know, consolidate the fragmentation. And when I mean consolidated consolidation of companies, that's kind of what Jordan was saying, like how can consolidate the audience and data to ensure that there's greater understanding of the consumer. You know, we see a lot of that fragmentation within a retail space also. Like, you know, I shop a lot at, you know, Whole Foods and Safeway.

Peter Vs. Bond (33:36)

But you know, when I'm traveling in Florida, I'm in Publix. And Publix all of a sudden says that I'm new to brand, to buying a Pepsi, but I'm not. I buy them all the time at Safeway. So it's, you know, that fragmentation exists not just within retail space, I think within different environments, you know, I think so it's having that Understanding and working with partners to minimize that consumer fragmentation is imperative. And by minimizing that fragmentation, not only are you improving the data quality to measure and optimize it, but you're also improving the consumer experience. If you understand that the same consumer that's watching multiple streaming services and you can ensure that you're providing a more seamless messaging to that consumer. And then you're also controlling for frequency, which is also imperative. Like if everyone, you know, if you're a Pepsi or Coke buyer in different, you know, retailers, and then you get same 10 frequency messaging for each of those retailers, you know, consumer saturation get pretty strong. But I think within a closed environment where you can actually control that frequency, control that messaging and control the consumer experience, then you're removing a lot of that ad waste, you're removing a lot of those friction points from the consumer. And then you're also driving much more efficiency to your campaign objectives.

Peter Vs. Bond (34:50)

Jordan, I'll make mention of the fact because you talked about the fact that people are jumping from one streaming service to another. As the person who's kind of the guardian of subscriptions within the household, when I ask my wife, how's Outlander going? It's not because I actually want to know how the show is going. I'm more interested in knowing when the last episode is so I can turn that off and then switch over to something like Apple plus, because I know the new season of the morning show is coming. But I play that shuffle game. Otherwise, there are eight months of the year that I'm paying for something that I'm getting no material value out of.

Shree Rajagopalan (35:27)

So, you know, I'm going to have to have a conversation with your wife about how Subscription Kingdom works.

Peter Vs. Bond (35:32)

Yeah, it's sree. It's an effort in futility. I have to do it surreptitiously so she doesn't. She as all she cares about is when the new episode, new new episode of the new season hits. The streaming service works as long as I can keep that going. I'm not getting any pushback. But in any event, Jordan, let me close this out. So you're a brand, you're looking at connected tv. You're thinking maybe it's right for me. I haven't really pulled the trigger on this. What's the best way for them to kind of get in the game and figure out if this is exactly right for them?

Jordan Ross (36:11)

About a year ago, we launched what we call Roku Ad Manager. And this is really a tool that is designed for advertisers who have some familiarity with social media or other large scale digital platforms. And it's really a, an easy way to upload a video or if you don't even have video, we have the ability for you to use generative AI to create your own video ad and immediately have that ad run across our television screen. And I think what's been interesting about it is it's helped advertisers understand that while there's certainly creative and media behavior differences between the digital environment and the digital television environment, those strategies and approaches can transfer. And so the barrier to entry has gotten quite a bit lower than it used to be. And I think the second key lesson I would say is CTV unlocks more than just the standard video ad opportunity. As I mentioned before, Jeff mentioned, the ability for interactive ads to become more natural. That is core to the Roku Ads Manager capability where you can add interactive active overlays to make your video advertising more shoppable and more engaging. And for many of our customers there who are direct to consumer companies and really performance oriented with their advertising, it's been a really interesting way for them to experiment at the intersection of social media and connected television to find efficiency. To find efficiency not just in the output and the outcomes, but the efficiency of just the workflow of getting up and running. And so we're early at helping kind of advertisers and us learn what works well in that space. And so it's never been easier to get started.

Shree Rajagopalan (37:49)

Jordan, I'm going to pen to Peter's question and kind of ask you how it is to work with Roku. What I mean by that is if an advertiser wants to get in touch, how should they get in touch with you? And then what can they expect? Do you guys give templates to work with? Do you make suggestions on how to curate and execute the ad? Is it an iterative collaborative process? Can you take us through that?

Jordan Ross (38:09)

I would say there's three main ways that advertisers work with us and it really matters. It's designed to map to their needs. So as I mentioned, the easiest way to get going is to log into Roku Ads Manager and do it all yourself and all the reporting and the real time optimization you can do from there is right at your fingertips. We do offer guides and templates and creative best practices to again take whatever worked well for you in social and bring it to ctv. Increasingly, a lot of advertisers maybe graduate to working within a demand side platform, a programmatic buying tool and they're treating connected Television and Roku and all the other inventory that lives across that just as part of a larger automated media mix. And so they're working with companies like the Trade Desk and Amazon and Google to really automate and make more accountable all of the advertising that they're doing. And connected television is a massive growing opportunity across that. And then somewhere in the middle is, you know, advertisers do work directly with us to manage advertising as well in a lot of ways. That's where we are able to add a lot of the consultation that we provide to help advertisers understand from our planning perspective, we can take their first party audience and help them understand what kinds of content they're watching across all of television all the way through to performance and measurement. And retail media is increasingly a focus for all of those buying modalities because of the desire to be accountable no matter which way you buy.

Shree Rajagopalan (39:38)

Awesome. Thank you both for this wonderful conversation. But let me thank our audience first for listening to this wonderful episode. I'll request that you leave us a rating and review on the Apple Podcast, Spotify or your favorite listening platform informs us how we're doing as well as we're having the right conversations. To all of you, thank you from Peter and me. You make the show happen to all our sponsors, whether this podcast, our parties, events, hosted dinners, having us speak at panels, being at your annual events. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Peter, what's your big takeaway on this episode?

Peter Vs. Bond (40:11)

Sree that personalization is table stakes. If you're going to really take advantage of streaming television, connected tv, you can't just serve up the same ad you would have served up if it was a non personalized ad because people don't respond in a greater manner. You have to take advantage of this rich format. You need to have a shoppable solution. You need to do much more than just simply build an audience and give the same old ad to this audience and a different, same old ad to a different audience. The game has been elevated. Consumers expect more. You have to take advantage of that. So working with Roku, understanding what the full functionality of this ad platform is, and make sure you are leveraging those capabilities to really engage consumers and get a better roi. That's my takeaway.

Shree Rajagopalan (41:07)

For me, Peter was right at the top of the show. The numbers that Jordan kind of took us through, which backed up by Jeff later in the conversation, CTV has arrived as a platform when there's so much consumption going on in a CTV mode as opposed to cable and analog and things over the air and things of that nature. Anyone not taking advantage as an advertiser of CTV is obviously missing out on the full experience when they do the ads on digital. So it's that realization that as we approach the new year and three months over here, as you build your marketing mix model and you decide where to put your money to make sure to include CTV in the first place. Because simply if you don't, it's just a mess. So let me thank you both for appearing in the show. Jordan and Jeff, it was wonderful to have you both.

Jordan Ross (41:53)

Thank you again for having us. This is a lot of fun.

Jeffrey Bustos (41:55)

Yeah, thank you so much.

Peter Vs. Bond (41:56)

It was awesome.

Shree Rajagopalan (41:57)

That's a wrap of this episode off. Wait for it. The CPG Guys of course.

Peter Vs. Bond (42:14)

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