Adobe customers can now target Roku viewers with over-the-top programmatic ads using their own first-party data, allowing the companies to reduce redundancies in ads.

This is the first time Roku has opened up its own first-party data to be matched with brands through programmatic ad buys, the companies said Tuesday at the Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. The deal is currently exclusive to Adobe, though Roku declined to comment whether it will partner with other companies in the near future.

There are more than 27 million active households using Roku devices. Roku says its differentiator is the data it has on those users, who must register information such as their email address, credit card number or home address when creating an account.

Roku says it opted to work with Adobe because its customers include Fortune 500 brands, many of which use Adobe services to manage their first-party data and make programmatic ad buys through its platform. The move will allow advertisers to match their data with Roku data and device IDs, which in turn will allow them to make targeted ad buys through automation.

Demand side platforms, which marketers use to make programmatic ad buys, cannot offer similar targeting due to lack of quality data, says Seth Walters, VP of demand partnerships, Roku "They need to partner with a company like Roku to do that," he says. "And this is our first partnership of this kind."

OTT frequency capping

The OTT ad experience is hardly grown up, as many users complain about seeing the same ads repeatedly. Roku and Adobe, however, say they've solved that problem, as marketers will be able to match both customer and device IDs when making their ad buys, says Keith Eadie, VP and general manager of Adobe Advertising Cloud.

"You couldn't do that before and so there were no frequency caps," Eadie says. "We are matching customer data to Roku data, and if a customer has seen an ad three times, we'll stop serving them. It's another big problem we're solving."

Most marketers want to target viewers through OTT using their own data, and they then want to measure the results using their own methods. Eadie says that marketers will be able to measure basic campaign data – such as exposure – through Adobe Advertising Cloud, but more granular measurement data won't be available at launch.

"In terms of robust measurement, we will be working on that moving forward," he adds.

The feature is available for Adobe customers using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Audience Manager and Analytics.