Roku has spent the last 20 years building out a platform through which millions of Americans can watch free streaming television. Now comes the hard part: making the content itself.

A little over a year after the streaming platform acquired a library of original programming from the defunct streamer Quibi, it’s hoping it can win over advertisers with even more original, ad-supported programming that can draw in bigger audiences than licensed content can.

Looking ahead: The company will head into the upfront season with its own lineup of content, not just acquired exclusives, for the very first time when it presents to advertisers on May 3.

There are dozens of original projects in the works, ranging from scripted comedies and dramas, to reality and nonfiction programming. Roku hopes the lineup will entice advertisers to shift even more of their budgets over to its service, especially when so much streaming content is ad-free.

Big picture: Even with 60+ million active accounts, Roku has realized that scale alone isn’t enough. Content, as the saying goes, is still king.

“We’re bringing our best content to our users for free through the AVOD business model, as opposed to putting it behind a paywall, which is what we’re seeing most other folks do,” Roku’s VP of programming Rob Holmes told Marketing Brew. “From an advertiser standpoint, the ability to reach that audience that is no longer available on TV with super high-caliber content as part of our upfront offering, we think it’s something that is going to really stand out.”

Starting with scale

Roku, which sells streaming hardware and software, has long been the method to stream television, not the destination itself. That changed in 2017, when the company created the Roku Channel, a free, ad-supported streaming destination that licensed and aggregated entertainment content and sold advertising against it.

• A year later, the company was pulling in more money from its platform business than from hardware sales; as of the end of 2021, Roku said the Roku Channel reached an estimated 80 million people.
• It wasn’t until last year that there was an opportunity to try something else: original programming. That development came in the wake of the shutdown of venture-backed, short-form video startup Quibi. Quibi’s original content, much of it never released, was now up for auction at fire-sale prices.
• Roku bought more than 75 titles for “significantly less” than $100 million, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, and has rolled out those shows since. The purchase of Quibi’s library was both “a great deal” and “an opportunity to learn,” Holmes said, but executives hesitated at the time to suggest the acquisition marked a grand shift in strategy.

In hindsight, though, it was the beginning of a recalibration. Read the full story here.—KS

Turns out, gamers aren’t just dudes in their parents’ basements.

While crass—and frankly, just as insulting in 2022 as it would have been in 2012—it’s a myth the gaming industry tried to dispel in a formal pitch to advertisers this week.

• On Tuesday, the IAB held its first-ever PlayFronts, an opportunity for the gaming industry to tout its legitimacy, basking in the glow of a boom partly spurred by Covid.
• Over the course of about eight hours and to an audience of roughly 350 in-person attendees (and a pretty decent lunch—conferences and events are back, baby!), the IAB crammed executives from Meta, Unilever, Zynga, Activision Blizzard, Twitch, and more into a whirling series of presentations aiming to prove that gamers are more diverse than people might assume and an essential part of a brand’s media plan.

At the event, Joanne Leong, VP and director of global media partnerships at Dentsu, recalled a time when she was trying to sell gaming advertisements by explaining, “‘Oh the gamer is not the guy in the basement that’s 22 years old’...And I feel like we’re still talking about that 10 years later.” Over the last “two or three years, there’s definitely been a shift in that mentality, but I don’t feel like it’s just quite there yet,” Leong said.

Co-op mode

Though gamers make up more than a third of the world’s population, according to the gaming analytics firm Newzoo, they represent less than 6% of the ~$140 billion in total digital ad spend, according to an IAB analysis.

Some more stats:

• A recent Deloitte survey of more than 1,000 Americans found that 65% play games at least once a week across devices.
• 13% of US gamers identify as LGBQ+, more than 33% are Black, Hispanic, or Asian, and 45% identify as women in the US and UK, according to a survey of more than 4,000 people published by Newzoo.

“It does seem weird that we’re still trying to dispel that stereotype,” Francesco Petruzzelli, chief technology officer at Bidstack, told Marketing Brew. “From my perspective, the conversation is over.” Later on, he added, “You shouldn’t be seen as an innovator because you’re spending some dollars in gaming.”

Read more here.—RB

Stores. Remember those? If you’ve spent the past few years relying on grocery delivery and Amazon packages, thoughts of standing on checkout lines (then fighting with self-checkout) might seem like distant memories.

Even as companies obsess over e-commerce, they still want us to shop IRL. But the role of the store is changing. Retail Brew’s Andrew Adam Newman recently wrote a five-part series on key trends in store design, covering how brands ranging from The Body Shop to McDonald’s are thinking about what their locations should look like and offer.

Check out each story below:

• The shoeless shoe store connecting e-commerce with brick-and-mortar shopping
  
• Why stores—like one permanent pop-up—should be designed more like Lego sets
  
• Why Timberland and others are using precious store space to support causes instead of showcasing products
  
• A futuristic McDonald’s in Australia is on the cutting edge of experiential retail
  
• Why an Italian supermarket chain moved bakers and cooks front and center in its superstore

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

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Money moves: Money With Katie is our weekly newsletter that takes a fresh approach to spending habits, investing best practices, and tax strategies. Finance bros are out, accessible personal finance is in. Check it out.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Pinterest announces policies to ban climate misinformation
• The dos and don’ts of running crypto ads on Reddit
• Fishwife made its presence known organically–now it’s thinking bigger

Which headlines are real marketing news, and which one is fake?

1. Coke promotes new pixel-flavored cola with Fortnite island
2. Chipotle lets Roblox players roll virtual burritos into real food
3. Miller Lite emphasizes taste with beer flavor drops
4. Megan Thee Stallion partners with My Little Pony on “Horse Girl Summer” campaign

Keep scrolling for the answer.