Roku, iSpot Team Up to Optimize Campaigns with Outcome Data

In the television advertising world, everyone is talking about outcomes. When marketers buy a commercial, they want to know how many people go to their website, visit their dealerships or go to the store and buy their product. In short, they want to know how big a bang they’re getting for their bucks.

Measuring TV ain’t easy. Just figuring out how many people saw an ad has proved to be a difficult chore as streaming fragments the audience. Nevertheless, a number of research, data and analytics companies offer to tell advertisers how well their commercials and campaigns performed.

Note that I said performed in the past tense, as in after the campaign has run its course. 

Now streaming TV giant Roku and measurement and analytics company iSpot are teaming up to help advertisers use real-time outcome measurement to increase the effectiveness of campaigns while they’re in flight.

Roku says it is the first major streaming publisher to use iSpot’s Outcomes at Scale product to optimize campaigns.

In early testing, it seems to work. Home security company SimpliSafe worked on an early test with Roku and iSpot and unlocked a 23% increase in leads and a 31% increase in website visits when comparing the optimized group to a control group.

“This advancement with Roku and iSpot gives us a powerful way to ensure our advertising spend works as effectively as possible,” said Courtney Strauss Manning, manager, media & customer acquisition, at SimpliSafe. “Our test campaign delivered positive results, showing significant gains across key performance indicators among the Roku audience. This partnership is clearly improving the effectiveness and efficiency of our media investments.”

Roku and iSpot will be pitching their process and its results at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. Miles Fisher, senior director, strategic advertising partnerships at Roku, told The Measure that Roku will look to get more marketers to test optimization by outcomes and hopes it will become more widely available during the upfronts.

“Outcomes are incredibly important to us,” Fisher said. “We believe the future of media buying will be automated and performance-based.” 

But Fisher added that he didn’t want programmatic technology to turn the TV ad business into the kind of race to the bottom in terms of pricing seen on other digital ad platforms. 

Some advertisers will be most interested in sales at the bottom of the marketing funnel. Others will be more interested in reach and awareness.

“That’s why somebody like iSpot is a great partner, because they’re looking at things full funnel,” Fisher said. “Without something like this, publishers would be flying blind.”

iSpot was initially known for measuring viewership to commercials. It has been steadily expanding its capabilities.

“We launched Outcomes at Scale a year ago with Paramount,” said Stuart Schwartzapfel, executive VP of media partnerships at iSpot.

Since then, a number of other traditional networks have signed on.

Outcomes at Scale lets networks track how campaigns are trending against a variety of key performance indicators (known as KPIs in the marketing biz). 

The new optimization product “is really more focused on that granular level. How do I take the signals that I’m seeing in flight and not just tell the advertiser how well they’re doing, but actually take actions to improve the performance of the campaigns so that they see noticeable better results,” Schwartzapfel said.

Because most Roku users have accounts and sign in, Roku has more data about its viewers and what they watch than other free ad-supported streaming services, such as Tubi or Pluto TV, Fisher said.

But the amount of data it gets about the results of campaigns is limited by what the brand or agency is willing to share. And then, that data arrives after a campaign is complete.

“This fits into Roku’s broader interoperability and performance strategy,” Fisher said. “What we can now do is use iSpot attributed outcomes to track ROI, adjust creative strategies, throttle inventory and then optimize towards business outcomes.”

Outcomes aren’t new to Roku. It works with a handful of major of retailers to help its clients gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Those retailers include Walmart, Best Buy, Instacart and Kroger. 

But the data from those retailers don’t come in immediately, unlike what Roku is getting from iSpot.

“The real goal here is real time intelligence and optimization for in quarter, in flight versus the longer pathways,” Fisher said. 

iSpot and Roku have been working together for about five years. Initially, Roku licensed iSpot’s ad catalog to verify which ads appeared on its platform. Last year, Roku began using iSpot’s audience and outcomes measurement. 

“What I’ve learned working with Roku is their willingness to actually act on data—not just talk about innovation,” said Schwartzapfel.

And if Roku convinces advertisers that iSpot’s data can help them make campaigns more effective, more might want to become iSpot clients as well.

“Certainly, we hope that this has a halo effect on how they view our measurement,” Schwartzapfel said.