Roku looks to first-party data to bring small businesses to streaming TV

As companies such as Google and Apple look to tighten access to cookies and consumer data, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) may find their options for targeted advertising scarce. To bridge the gap for those businesses hoping to snag eyeballs in the ever-growing and competitive world of streaming, Roku announced today a new program to make the process more accessible.

Roku announced a new program that will offer streaming audience data and ad buying tools directly to SMB clients and announced Camelot Strategic Marketing & Media as its first partner for the program. The platform will run through its ad buying platform OneView, which Roku launched in early 2020. 

“Small and Medium-Sized Businesses want to diversify ad spend away from search and social,” Tommy Burk, senior director of Roku’s OneView platform, told Ad Age via email. “Camelot will be the first agency to use OneView to do just that—give SMBs a better experience with TV streaming advertising using OneView.”

OneView allows marketers to place and measure campaigns on Roku’s owned channels, which boast 63 million active global accounts, as well as through its partner platforms.

Roku is the latest streaming platform to look to woo SMBs, which have become eager to test connected TV. For several years, Hulu has looked to appeal to these marketers by offering a self-serve advertising platform that makes ad space available to advertisers who otherwise might have been priced out of the market. 

Camelot CEO Sam Bloom told Ad Age over email that the agency chose to partner with Roku because of the company’s “unrivaled scale, targeting and measurement in a marketplace that’s demanding it.” The agency has teamed with Roku frequently over the past six years, the first to certify its traders on the OneView platform for Fortune 500 clients and was a launch partner for Roku’s data clean room offering.