Roku has seen the future of your TV, and it's a shop. The next stage in smart TV advertising looks a lot like Instagram, with “shoppable” ads that enable you to buy things directly from the ads you're seeing on your TV – so for example you'll be able to order in pizza while you're enjoying a movie, or order clothes you've seen during a show's sponsored pre-roll.
That's according to Roku's Mike Shaw, who is director of international ad sales; he says that TV commerce is a golden opportunity for retailers. Instead of passive advertising by only the biggest brands, you could see ads from much smaller, more local sellers – and it'll be much easier to buy from them. According to Shaw, we'll see very similar ads to the ones we currently see in our social media feeds. And like those ads, we'll be able to buy directly from them.
Product placement, meet instant gratification
Shaw was writing for the retail site Retail Tech Innovation Hub, which is aimed at brands rather than TV viewers, and he describes “reducing the sales funnel down to just one click”: your TV remote would become a magic wand beckoning burger deliveries and summoning shopping with the absolute minimum of effort by you.
As Shaw describes it, “consumers can click and buy products while enjoying an evening show, or order food and snacks when watching a sports game – it’s all part of a complementary, branched out buyer’s journey.”
You can see the appeal to advertisers: these ads would be targeted based on your viewing data and other personalized information, and could use the same payment details you've already provided to your streaming service: think Amazon's 1-Click but with your remote rather than your phone.
Roku is not the only company thinking in this direction: LG's ad boss Tony Marlow wrote a similar pean to shoppable ads in the ad industry magazine The Drum earlier this year. As he pointed out, 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 your sofa, which have proved fairly popular, but the goal is to have a system where you won't need to reach for your smartphone at all.
According to Marlow, “QR code enabled ads are just the beginning”, with marketers already trialling “quick checkout buying through a TV set, click-to-save options, and the ability to utilise the voice capabilities of a TV to save an item to a cart… we are only just beginning to see what shoppable ads can bring to viewers.”
Now, whether we want to see this on our TVs is another question entirely, but it's all part of the general direction these services are going in. Netflix has now totally removed its cheaper tier that doesn't include ads, Google TV is building up a new ad network that will include unskippable ads, Prime Video just started delivering ads to existing subscribers and charging you extra if you don't want them, and Roku itself already testing and launching video ads on the home screen.
Perhaps this ad-pocalypse is part of why physical media has seen an uptick in popularity in some stores despite streaming's dominance. It certainly seems like if you buy one of the best smart TVs with any platform, you're going to be shown a lot more ads, and a lot more variety of them, than just a couple of years ago.
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