Roku’s advertising director wants to bring Instagram-style shoppable ads to your smart TV
Roku has seen the future of your TV, and it’s a store. The next phase of smart TV advertising looks a lot like Instagram, with “shoppable” ads that let you buy things directly from the ads you see on your TV. So you can order pizza while watching a movie, for example, or order clothes you saw during a show’s sponsored pre-roll.
That’s according to Roku’s Mike Shaw, director of international ad sales; he says TV commerce is a golden opportunity for retailers. Instead of passive advertising from just the biggest brands, you’ll be able to see ads from a lot of smaller, more local sellers — and it’ll be a lot easier to buy from them. According to Shaw, we’ll see ads that look a lot like the ads we see in our social media feeds now. And just like those ads, we’ll be able to buy directly from them.
Product placement, instant gratification
Shaw wrote for the retail site Retail Tech Innovation Centerthat focuses on brands rather than TV viewers. He describes how he can “shrink the sales funnel to a single click”: your TV remote becomes a magic wand that takes you to burger delivery guys and stores with minimal effort.
As Shaw describes it: “Consumers can click on and buy products while enjoying an evening programme, or order food and snacks while watching a sporting event – it’s all part of an additional, branching customer journey.”
Now you can see the appeal for advertisers: These ads are targeted based on your viewing data and other personalized information. Plus, they can use the same payment information you already provided to your streaming service: think Amazon’s 1-Click, but with your remote instead of your phone.
Roku isn’t the only company thinking along these lines: LG’s advertising chief Tony Marlow wrote a similar paean to shoppable ads in the advertising industry magazine The drum earlier this year. As he noted, Paramount is experimenting with shoppable ads in Australia, and in the UK, both ITV and Channel 4 have done the same. So far, the focus has been on QR codes that you can scan on your phone from the comfort of your couch, which have proven quite popular, but the aim is to have a system where you don’t have to reach for your smartphone at all.
According to Marlow, QR code ads are just the beginning. Marketers are already testing “fast checkout on a TV, save options, and using a TV’s voice functionality to save an item to a cart. We’re just scratching the surface of what buy-a-thon ads can offer viewers.”
Whether we’ll want to see this on our TVs is another question entirely, but it’s all part of the general direction these services are going. Netflix has now completely removed its cheaper ad-free tier, Google TV is in the process of setting up a new ad network with non-skippable ads, Prime Video just started delivering ads to existing subscribers and charging extra if you don’t want them, and Roku itself is already testing and rolling out video ads on the home screen.
Perhaps this adpocalypse is part of the reason why physical media has become more popular in some stores, despite the dominance of streaming. It certainly seems like if you buy one of the best smart TVs with any platform, you’re going to be exposed to a lot more ads, and a lot more variety, than you would have a few years ago.
