“Roku approaches this as really a TV-first platform. We are not trying to be a search ads business. We are a television-first platform that’s unbiased to work with many partners who are in the business of commerce,” Hamilton said. “We want to make an open ecosystem where we empower those commerce platforms and retailers to connect to television as a digital front end.”
Among the publishers in the lead, marketers praised Roku and NBCUniversal for their strides in partnerships and fulfillment. In addition, Metz pointed to Amazon as a “behemoth lying in wait,” considering its end-to-end capabilities and upcoming entertainment offerings such as the first Black Friday NFL game.
“If you think about the evolution, we’ve got these amazing capabilities,” Metz said. “Now we’re looking to scale those capabilities and to see the American consumer adopt them.”
But adoption is easier said than done. Just look at the biggest trend in shoppable right now: QR codes.
De-coding the experience
QR codes have been around in some form since 1994. However, they didn’t explode until relatively recently, with automatic recognition on smartphones making interactions more seamless and the Covid-19 pandemic popularizing the hands-free safety of the experience.
Now, they’re everywhere, from restaurant menus to the most-talked-about Super Bowl commercials.
However, publishers don’t necessarily see QR codes as the be-all and end-all in shoppable. When Roku first began testing on-screen ad engagement, the company found typical response rates were 0.04% of users pressing “OK” on an ad, and it was even less for QR codes.
Following months of testing, Roku’s benchmarks have shifted to 1-2% of viewers responding through a remote control, though results have not yet hit a whole-point percentage through QR codes, which are at 0.6-0.7%.
“That messaging has been quite pervasive over the last couple years, that QR codes are the savior of shoppable,” Hamilton said. “We just have not found any data to support that. In terms of true direct response and performance, it lags well behind what the operating system can provide with the remote control or with a mobile app.”
It may “take a little bit of time” for consumers to catch on to shoppable innovations, according to Lauri Baker, svp, strategic partnerships, Infillion, but contextually relevant prompting from the industry, whether through on-screen pop-ups or in-scene components, will inevitably speed up the process.
“Now that the living room has become digitized, it’s the industry’s responsibility to innovate and reimagine the commercial experience. The last thing we want to do with CTV and streaming is replace the old linear model into streaming,” Baker said. “[Shoppability] is a huge step forward in allowing our industry to rethink what commercials and ads actually look like.”
