CTV Festival Keynote: Roku’s Brian Toombs

Day one of the Connected TV Festival wrapped with an insightful conversation with Brian Toombs, the head of Roku Brand Studio, about how the company is using its significant reach to scale its options for advertisers.

Roku has a commanding share of the TV OS operating system market, while The Roku Channel is a top-ten service in the U.S. Toombs, in conversation with World Screen’s Mansha Daswani, highlighted the various ways Roku can bring clients into the mix, from shoppable TV opportunities to branded entertainment. You can watch the session here.

“The Roku Brand Studio is a group in the content organization that is dedicated to building partnerships with brands,” Toombs said. “We are a link between our ad sales group and the content group. We are divided into two main categories or verticals. One is products, which are things that we make in partnership with our brand partners—everything from custom content to full-on series to integrating them into our Roku originals to building bespoke content solutions for them. And then we’re a service organization. So, not only do we create, develop and help our ad sales team sell these content partnerships, we also execute them and work with our clients on taking them all the way from paper development through launch.”

Addressing the CTV opportunity amid a weaker advertising climate, Toombs stressed, “CTV is TV. TV is one of the oldest media we have. It’s very familiar to people. Consumers say that TV feels safe to them. We have half of the connected televisions in America. We have tens of millions of users. When you’re watching TV, you’re engaged. Being able to grab an audience and engage them, a large audience, and then being able to use the digital tools—that’s the C part of TV—to target people really provides a powerful platform from which to operate, particularly for brand partners. We have reached a point in the evolution of this business where programmatic is highly saturated. It’s an important tool, and it’s still not reaching everybody. TV is another one of those tools for brands and for content providers such as us to reach a large audience, but then also specifically target within that group.”

Roku is positioning itself as a leader in the shoppable TV space. “We have the remote,” he explained. “That gives the consumer the ability to take an action. Press OK to receive a text. We have tremendous retail partnerships with folks like Walmart, Kroger and Instacart, where you can click and check out. You can add something to your basket. We’re also in partnership with them in their retail media businesses. That’s a really big growth area for retailers—selling their media and partnering with brands on their side. It translates to our side with a data exchange where we can follow you from the store into your TV environment and vice versa. We provide you with content and ads that make sense for you, but it also provides the opportunity to take an action from your couch—you can make a purchase or you can save an item for purchase later.”

On working with brands to bring them into the Roku ecosystem, Toombs noted that it’s a “cross-functional effort” involving execs from the Brand Studio, ad sales, ad marketing, content monetization and client solutions teams. “We work with all of them because when we work with brands, it’s generally at a pretty macro level. They have a campaign that they want to run, and they want to put that message in a variety of places. We come as the CTV solution. These partnerships arise in a variety of ways. The most basic way is, we have a message, we need partners to help get that message out, so we send out an RFP. It really begins with the audience. What kind of audience are you trying to reach? And what is the message that you’re trying to deliver? And then we work with the client solutions team to bring the content portion of what the Roku package means. If you’re an advertiser, we’re going to place you in a variety of places that grab that audience. And then for my team it’s, what content vehicle makes sense? That could be the sponsorship of The Rich Eisen Show. That could mean we’re going to build you a fully bespoke documentary series. That also could just mean we’re going to bring you into one of our content curation environments in a unique way. It’s generally bespoke, but it could be as turnkey as they would like it.”

Brand integrations are more prevalent in sports and non-scripted, but there are opportunities in scripted, Toombs said.

“Scripted requires a little bit more collaboration. Also, you have to keep it PG. It has to be brand-safe. So, that narrows the aperture a little bit. Drama tends to go in areas that you don’t want to play with if you’re a brand. So, it’s certainly more prevalent in unscripted and sports for sure, but I do see a lot of opportunity in scripted, particularly with comedy.”

Toombs joined Roku from Funny or Die. Asked about that transition, he noted, “I went from working at an independent comedy web publisher/production company to a publicly traded tech platform. It could not have gone better! What I took from Funny or Die to Roku is that in many ways, Roku was just operating on a much larger scale, but in a similar manner. Grow really fast. Have to be nimble. Have to get your hands dirty. Have to be able to figure things out for yourself.”

He continued, “We have a partner in the business that calls us the billion-dollar mom-and-pop shop. It’s that scrappy, do-it-yourself nature that comes from Funny or Die and digital publishing in general that drives a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit that we have here at Roku.”