For brands and streaming services alike, the hottest real estate in town is in Roku City.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of SpongeBob SquarePants, Paramount+ is throwing a Roku City parade featuring the characters from Bikini Bottom. Ahead of the Season 2 release of House of the Dragon, Warner Bros. Discovery shipped in a fire-breathing dragon and a castle bearing the Targaryen sigil. In April, a Spotify bus drove through Roku City’s downtown to celebrate the release of the Taylor Swift album The Tortured Poets Department.
And like the real-life cities Roku City is only loosely modeled after, the roads are sometimes choked with cars—and the cars have ads on them: DoorDash signed on as the first partner to buy digital car ads earlier this year.
As CTV continues to grow in popularity, advertisers of all kinds are capitalizing on the attention they can get by being in Roku’s screensaver turned marketing vehicle.
“Being in Roku City just gave us that additional layer and compliment to our partnership…and allowed us to be in a more in-your-face, front-and-center way on connected TV,” Jennifer Austin, senior director of media strategy at Carnival Cruise Line, which ran a campaign on Roku City last fall, said.
Cruise control
Roku City has been accepting brand partners since mid-2023, when McDonald’s became the virtual city’s first advertiser. It was a few months later that Carnival Cruise Line docked a cruise ship in Roku City for two weeks last fall to promote its new cruise ship, the Carnival Jubilee, Austin told us.
The stunt, which marked the first time a travel brand advertised in Roku City, had positive results: consumers exposed to the digital activation were more likely to visit Carnival Cruise’s website, she told us.
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Since the Carnival activation, Roku’s audience has only grown. Roku said it had more than 80 million active accounts as of February, and the company claims that its Home Screen now reaches almost 120 million people every day across US households.
Screen queen
Advertiser interest in Roku City comes amid a broader surge in advertising spend on CTV. According to a recent report from The Trade Desk, 43% of Americans are spending more time streaming because “more of their favorite content is on CTV,” the report’s authors wrote.
“This swerve in viewer behavior is prompting advertisers to increase spending on CTV—and in some cases, to lead with CTV in their TV strategy,” the report continued.
In addition to Roku, companies including LinkedIn and Disney have debuted new CTV ads in the past few months, while Walmart announced the acquisition of CTV manufacturer Vizio in an effort to bolster its advertising footprint. To make matters more competitive, Amazon Prime Video, which rolled out an ad-supported tier in January, announced in April that it had reached 200 million monthly viewers.
“The core of our work right now is on audience-targeted OTT and CTV campaigns,” Kevin Cahn, AVP and head of media COEs at Kepler, told Marketing Brew. “We feel certainly that some of these new ad formats and the expanded Roku City and/or video marquee ads could be a nice complement to that.”