Roku Consolidates Creative and Digital with Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners

Roku has consolidated its creative, digital and media business with Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners as its new CMO sets a higher bar for this holiday season and beyond. The TV-streaming electronics brand also hired Sellpoints to support various digital shopper-marketing efforts. "If you think about this holiday season across the whole landscape, one thing happening is it's going to be a big season for streaming," said Roku Chief Marketing Officer Matthew Anderson. "I felt pretty strongly that there was a big creative opportunity for us and an opportunity to put together a strong digital capability that might be more than we've done in the past." The company ran two separate reviews focused on creative and digital and invited Sausalito, Calif.-based BSSP to participate in both. Nine other shops participated in the process, including creative incumbent Division of Labor, he said. "Most of the agencies we saw were in one camp or another," he said. "BSSP did both. They've been very successful in working with brands like Mini and Priceline who have distinctive creative." The incumbent did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mr. Anderson is seven weeks into the new gig as CMOS, but he spent a year in a consulting role at the company. "We need to have a real profile as the category continues to explode," he said. "It's helpful to have an agency with a lot of resources and experience with companies ... our size." It's also helpful to have a marketing budget that will exceed last year's budget of $10 million, he explained. Much of that budget will go toward a holiday campaign. Roku spent $8 million on measured media in 2012, according to Kantar Media. That's tiny compared to top-spending competitors like Apple and Google that have aggressively marketed their streaming products. Both Apple and Google were among the top 100 U.S. ad spenders in 2012 -- No. 60 and No. 28, respectively, according to Ad Age DataCenter -- and that was before they made TV-based video streaming a priority. Working with the challenger shouldn't be an issue for BSSP, which stood out due to its experience working with "marketing budgets for companies that are not the single largest in their category but punched above their weight," said Mr. Anderson. BSSP also recently won the U.S. Bank creative business.

Roku Consolidates Creative and Digital with Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners

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