“People don’t realize how new we are to the NewFront,” Levin said. “We’re often compared to businesses that have been around for 50 years.”

The future is shoppable

As for where it goes from here, Roku is having a shoppable moment.

The company became one of the first streaming platforms to fully lean into shoppable experiences. It recently announced a partnership with Instacart designed to help CPG advertisers make TV advertising more relevant and performance-driven. The deal combines viewership data from Roku and insights from Instacart, which allows marketers to quantify the impact of TV streaming advertising on product sales.

Initial results have been strong. For example, in a pilot with a personal care brand, 60% of customers that purchased the brand after seeing the Roku campaign were new to the company. For a beverage brand, new purchasers had a 70% higher repeat rate than the average new-to-the-brand buyer on Instacart.

The Instacart deal adds to retail partnerships with other brands like Microsoft, BestBuy, Cox Automotive, DoorDash, Kroger, Walmart and others. Shoppable was a huge selling point for Roku in its 2022 upfronts pitch, and advertisers can expect to see more of that heading into the 2023 deals.

“We want marketers to understand the lower funnel, measurement and outcomes of their campaigns beyond what we can measure on our own, and those partnerships have been incredibly successful,” Levin said.

The shoppable offerings have also been attractive to early partners like Unilever, with Unilever’s head of media investment and partnerships, Aaron Sobol, specifically referencing Walmart and the click-to-buy offering and Roku’s DoorDash deal.

“They tend to innovate with the likes of DoorDash, and if you think about some of our brands, [we] love to see how shoppable in the living room really performs in an on-demand environment,” he said.

Roku is planning to announce new ad experiences, new brand integrations, content and more at its NewFronts presentation Tuesday. Last week, the company announced a primetime reach guarantee, meaning Roku is guaranteeing it will reach more consumers than the top five average cable network shows.

“We’re running multiple tests on this and have consistently out-delivered the cable networks on reach,” Levin said. “The last thing you were holding on to with cable is the fast reach, and we can deliver that better than cable.”