Roku will offer free use of a platform that repurposes social content into connected TV (CTV) creative to advertisers running campaigns through its self-service platform, per details shared exclusively with Marketing Dive. The streaming platform will cover the creative fees for advertisers that run Spaceback creative on Roku Ads Manager campaigns through Q1 2025, helping performance-minded brands make the jump to the biggest screen in the home.
“Roku Ads Manager helps socially native brands [be] able to utilize their most successful social assets on TV. Spaceback is the leader in the space, removing creative friction, costs, and production times to ensure any brand can lean into TV advertising using creative assets they know their audience responds to,” said Dan Lapinski, head of Roku Ads Manager product marketing, in emailed comments.
The use of Spaceback’s platform, which takes videos from social platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X and Pinterest and transforms them into premium TV ads, can help advertisers that otherwise don’t have the budget to produce ads for TV. Go Fast Campers, a brand that helps consumers turn their trucks into campers, found Spaceback creative on Roku to be a “game-changer,” according to Robert Fowler, the company’s director of sales and marketing.
“Our Spaceback creative on Roku led to visitors staying on our site three times longer compared to other paid media,” Fowler said in a statement. “Spaceback made it incredibly easy to repurpose our social creatives for CTV, and the impact was clear: CTV delivered exceptional engagement and performance and was a minimal lift for our team.”
Preparing for the future of CTV
Roku in September launched Roku Ads Manager, offering small- and medium-sized businesses ways to optimize performance, competitive pricing, interactive ad formats and self-service shoppable ads powered by Shopify. The Shopify partnership, which Roku claims is a first for the CTV space, speaks to how content and commerce continue to converge. Recent months have seen media companies Netflix and NBCUniversal roll out new shoppable integrations with Google and Walmart, respectively.
Roku Ads Manager could help the company capture a share of the 20,000 small- and mid-sized marketers it predicts will enter the streaming TV ad market in 2025. The trend has accelerated in part due to the emergence of self-service tools like its own, those offered by streaming TV competitors and those developed by ad-tech firms.
The expected surge in new advertisers to streaming TV would represent a major shift in spending priorities. The largest advertisers that do not currently use TV are estimated to have annual budgets of roughly $500,000, according to Madison and Wall estimates shared in reactions to Roku's predictions. Assuming the same advertiser group were to shift half their spend to TV, the pool would total $5 billion, or 7% of all TV advertising and nearly a quarter of CTV advertising.
Roku’s platform revenue was up 15% year over year in Q3, marking its first quarter of more than $1 billion in total net revenue. It is the top TV streaming platform in the U.S. by hours streamed, per Hypothesis Group data cited by the company, and seems poised to capture new CTV spend as it continues to build out its platform with self-service tools and partnerships like the one with Spaceback.
“Roku Ads Manager is the front door for brands looking to connect with our amazing community of streamers, reaching them wherever they may be streaming,” Lapinski said. “Adding this creative offering [with Spaceback] to our already massive reach and true performance features, we think the choice is clear on which platform is best for brands.”
