Best Buy, Roku Build Advertising, Product Partnership

Roku and consumer electronics retailer Best Buy have developed a relationship across their advertising and retail businesses. The partners will combine advertising data from the retailer's Best Buy Ads platform with first-party data for targeting and closed-loop measurement from the TV streaming platform. Best Buy will also give shoppers exclusive access to Roku’s new branded TVs.

In 2022, 82% of U.S. advertisers, including consumer electronics brands, planned to increase spending levels with retailer media networks like Best Buy Ads, according to eMarketer. As consumers and marketers alike are set to spend more on streaming TV in 2023, Roku and Best Buy aim to create a better TV experience for their mutual customers and advertising partners, including:

• Roku Select and Plus Series TVs exclusively available at Best Buy: The first TVs to be designed and made by Roku are now available in the U.S. exclusively at Best Buy stores and Bestbuy.com via a dedicated brand shop.
• Roku Advertising and Best Buy Ads: Brands can work with Best Buy and Roku to target and measure their product ads to Roku viewers using Best Buy shopper data to ensure consumers are seeing advertising content that is most relevant to them and based on their shopping habits at the retailer.
• Best Buy Home Theater Experience: Roku brought its iconic Roku City screensaver to life with an immersive, multi-level pop-up activation at SXSW on March 11-12 in Austin, Texas. At the center of the interactive, purple-themed pop-up was a Best Buy Home Theater Experience, showcasing the latest Roku devices available at the retailer as well as new Roku Originals and featured entertainment on The Roku Channel.

The Roku City screensaver employed on TVs connected to Roku devices (and now branded TVs) was introduced in 2017 to streamers as an “urban utopia, where aliens don’t invade, they visit” and “monsters don’t destroy buildings, they rearrange them,” according to Roku. The company says it drew inspiration for the moving visual from the imaginations of social media fans who love to celebrate movies and TV. According to internal Twitter data highlighted by Roku, mentions of “Roku City” appears once every 12 minutes. However, until this year, the purple-hued metropolis has only ever existed as a virtual destination.

Best Buy and Roku believe that the combination of the streaming giant’s 70 million active accounts and the consumer electronics retailer’s millions of customers will help advertisers make their marketing more impactful and effective, according to a media release from Roku.

“Our goal is to create a better TV experience for everyone,” Julian Mintz, co-head of U.S. brand sales for Roku Media, said in the release. “We’re bringing together our entire business to build the future of entertainment and advertising — making the TV experience simpler, offering the right marketing, data, tech and scale to drive real results, and helping win the entire streamer’s journey together with Best Buy.”

The collaboration between the partners immediately followed news that Roku would roll out its system OS 12 software in the coming weeks. The system includes new content discovery features, local news channels and news recommendations that is “powered by AI” and curated to streamers, as well as an updated mobile app design, according to recent media release from Roku.