Viewers will be able to press “OK” with their remote on a shoppable ad, and then proceed to check-out. Their payment details will be pre-populated from Roku’s payment platform, Roku Pay, and after tapping “OK” on the Walmart checkout page, the order is placed. Users will then receive a confirmation email from Walmart, including shipping, return, and support information.

Roku’s ad-buying platform for TV streaming – OneView – will exclusively have the ability to activate and measure these shoppable ads. The company believes its ad tech stack – with targeting, optimisation and measurement capabilities – will “bring all the benefits of streaming TV advertising…to the commerce partnership.”

Through Roku Brand Studio, advertisers will be able to design creative and branded content specifically for a TV streaming and shopping environment.

Peter Hamilton, Head of TV Commerce at Roku, said: “We’re making shopping on TV as easy as it is on social. For years, streamers have purchased new Roku devices and signed up for millions of subscriptions with their Roku remote. Streaming commerce brings that same ease and convenience to marketers and shoppers.”

Both FOX and Discovery have said they will use Roku’s watermark solution to verify their inventory, and ad technology providers Google, HUMAN, Basic Technologies, Innovid and Magnite, have announced they will be integrating the technology after it is rolled out. Roku-owned OneView will be the first ad buying platform to offer inventory automatically validated by the solution.

Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management at Roku, said “As America’s No. 1 TV Streaming Platform, we are uniquely positioned to help the industry preempt device spoofing. This is powerful and free technology that will help advertisers accelerate their shift to TV streaming with even more confidence.”

Bill Murray, Vice President of Programmatic Solutions, Discovery, commented “Roku’s Advertising Watermark assures our advertiser clients that they are buying genuine Discovery inventory on Roku devices. We’re excited that Roku has brought its data, operating system, and ad technology together to easily prevent ad spoofing.”

Ad verification platform DoubleVerify analysed over a trillion CTV ad impressions across 80 markets between May 2020 and June 2021, and found significant adoption of spoofing scams over bot scams by fraudsters. Bot scams experienced a 44% drop, and over the period observed 36% of all CTV fraud was conducted through spoofing. DoubleVerify reports that, in Q4 2021, 18% of unprotected CTV ads traded programmatically were either invalid traffic or fraud.

Roku says OneView is attractive to advertisers because it combines Roku data from its streaming platform, ad space from The Roku Channel, and Roku ad experiences that “go beyond the traditional TV spot.” The company also believes that audience guarantees on OneView, ahead of upfronts, will make it easier for marketers to plan and measure an entire TV streaming upfront with apples-to-apples measurement to linear TV.

Additionally, media sellers that use OneView as a demand source can use proprietary data signals from Roku to enhance the accuracy of their own audience guarantees and therefore waste fewer ad impressions to meet them.

Tyler DeNicola, Vice President of Programmatic Revenue and Partnerships at A+E Networks (a media and entertainment company and broadcaster) said, “A+E Networks is excited to work with Roku to utilise its OneView Ad Platform audience measurement capabilities for our clients, and to help advance the industry as a whole. Now we can offer brands improved performance, less waste and new guarantees across our streaming ad inventory.”

In 2015, Roku adopted Nielsen guarantees for its TV streaming platform and last year the two companies announced a strategic alliance geared towards shaping “the future of media measurement and TV advertising in a streaming-first market”. Since then, Roku has acquired Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business, including the audience measurement company’s video automatic content recognition (ACR) and dynamic ad insertion technologies (DAI). The acquisition occurred as Roku has sought to accelerate the launch of an end-to-end DAI solution, enabling TV programmers to replace traditional TV ads with targeted ads in real-time.

Louqman Parampath, VP of Product Management at Roku said, “We believe that all TV ads will be streamed and that all TV ad measurement will be automated. Now, upfront advertisers in OneView will be among the first to see audience overlap across major devices, channels, and publishers on their plan. Our goal is to offer diverse tech and measurement offerings that move the industry forward”.