Roku is looking to woo marketers by showing them how to future-proof their advertising in its latest campaign. 

Less than two months after launching its largest-ever consumer-facing brand campaign, Roku is back with a new push by marketers, for marketers, that touts the company’s OneView demand-side platform. Created with R/GA, the new campaign represents the most significant advertising effort to date from Roku’s own ad business and its first push for OneView itself as it gears up for advancing changes in almost all aspects of the marketing industry.

Launched in May 2020, OneView is Roku’s proprietary ad platform that allows brands and agencies to purchase ad inventory directly with its streaming TV properties.

The campaign’s focus on marketers themselves, as people, influenced the channels on which the creative will run, according to Jordan Rost, head of ad marketing at Roku. “A lot of b-to-b marketing is very rational, but we wanted to strike at the emotion,” Rost said.

Rost acknowledged that there’s a lot going on in the advertising world today, from TV buyers shifting away from linear to performance marketers grappling with the eventual death of third-party cookies, but said Roku's new campaign will tell marketers how they can “completely future-proof” their operations using OneView.

OneView has seen its reach steadily grow since its inception last year; last quarter, TV streaming impressions delivered through the platform were up 141% year-over-year, the company reported.

“We’ve always believed that all TV ads will be streamed,” Alison Levin, then-VP of ad sales and strategy at Roku, said to Ad Age at the time of OneView’s launch. “The ability to scale in streaming comes down to being able to scale against high-valued audiences—which is dependent on identity—and having access to as much inventory as possible.”

OK, Roku Does That

The new advertiser-focused effort comes on the heels of “OK, Roku Does That,” another campaign the streaming giant developed with R/GA’s California office, which rolled out in late September in advance of the holiday shopping season.

Targeted at streaming consumers, “OK, Roku Does That” marked the company’s largest-ever general ad campaign, with the company investing “tens of millions of dollars” on it, Roku’s VP of marketing, Dan Robbins, recently told Ad Age. To put that spend in perspective, Roku spent $7.1 million on marketing in all of 2020, according to its annual filing to U.S. regulators.

The digital aspects of that push are managed by OneView.

“The work that we did on the consumer side with R/GA was to establish that Roku has made TV completely simple,” Rost said. “We worked really closely with them to apply the creative and value propositions [from the ‘OK, Roku Does That’ campaign] into the advertising audience.”

“We’re trying to get as personalized as we possibly can” with the new campaign, he added, noting that much like with “OK, Roku Does That,” the company is also deploying OneView in its latest roll-out. “We’re really keen to tell stories about marketers as part of this campaign,” Rost said, citing advertisers like Lexus that use OneView to manage their TV buys.

The latest OneView campaign for marketers “started in earnest” during Advertising Week in October, said Rost, and began rolling out more widely on Nov. 12.

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