Why the Roku remote is boosting CTV ad conversion rates 5X over QR codes

So we know CTV is all the rage. Digital marketers can now access it programmatically, it’s targetable, you can bring audiences, and CTV attribution has improved massively over the wild, wild west it used to be just a few short years ago. But how can something as simple as a remote control boost CTV ad conversion rates literally 5X over QR codes?

(Not to mention response or click-through rates that are hundreds of percent higher.)

That’s just 1 of the things former TUNE chief executive and current Roku head of ad innovation Peter Hamilton and I chatted about on the Growth Masterminds podcast. 

Click play and keep scrolling (but also don’t forget to subscribe):

Boosting CTV ad conversion rates

How can a remote control boost CTV ad conversion rates?

As usual, it’s all about the user experience. The key is buttons.

“The remote is just so much a part of the television viewing experience,” Hamilton says. “It’s what makes the TV a heads-up viewing display, right? A heads-up display means I’m looking at something, I’m doing something else with my hands and I’m not looking at my hands while I’m doing it.”

We all do this all the time.

For you, it might be the remote your TV came with. It might be your car. It might be a PlayStation or Xbox controller. Whatever it is, you’ve used it for enough hours in enough different situations that you know without looking where the skip or rewind buttons are, or where the jump or fire buttons are, or how to boost the volume on the car stereo, or drop it down a bit.

That’s heads-up.

Contrast that with a phone. Phones don’t come with buttons anymore, for the most part. To hit a control or make a change in an app, you need to look at your phone’s screen first. And that’s a different user experience.

A QR code, the first real attempt to make TV or CTV ad conversion rates directly and deterministically trackable, is actually a good thing to include in a CTV ad, but not so much for the reason you might think. Multiple marketers have told me that just the presence of a QR code boosts CTV ad performance rates. My guess is that’s because it’s a call to action, and you’ll see similar results for different measurement and trackability actions. But to actually make it work, someone has to interrupt their flow, grab their phone, look at the screen, find an app (the camera), and focus it on the screen.

Plus, they’ve got some work to do when the link actually pops up.

How the Roku remote helps is that Roku has an ad unit that you can respond to simply by clicking OK. No fumbling, no additional devices, just the 1 that is already in your hand.

“As we started building ad units where an overlay would come out over an in-stream video and say, press okay to learn more or buy now, we immediately saw baselines that were better than QR codes,” Hamilton says. “Over time as we continue to test these units, improve them, optimize what they look like, how they show, how they come in, how long they stay … we’ve gotten to the point where we see response rates up in the 1% level.”

Which compares to .02% to .04% for QR codes.

Which is a 2,400% boost, and which leads to 400-500% conversion rate improvements.

(There’s always some drop-off between click-through and conversion; and in this case there’s a few extra steps: check the text message, agree to the purchase, open the email, etc.)

CTV spend rates increasing, including by Singular customers

One of the reasons I wanted to chat with Roku on Growth Masterminds is that I do the Singular Quarterly Trends Report as well as the Singular ROI Index, and CTV keeps popping up. There’s a bunch of names that I’m seeing more and more, and with increased spend, including:

• Roku
• TVSquared
• LG Ads
• Unity CTV

But the biggest and fastest growing is Roku. 

That tracks with what the analysts are saying. In 2022 eMarketer said that CTV ad spend would double by 2026. More recently, Statista says that CTV ad spend should hit $42.4 billion by 2027. That’s still a fraction of mobile ad spend, but growth there is slowing, while growth in CTV is accelerating thanks to increased inventory as linear TV dies a slow, messy death and CTV becomes more programmatically addressable.

That’s been the primary driver of CTV ad growth, Hamilton says.

But he’s cautious to suggest that CTV is still in its early stages.

Performance marketing is more than harvesting

One of the reasons mobile marketers are coming to CTV, Hamilton suggests, is a growing understanding that performance marketers can’t just always harvest the fruit that others have planted.

I mean … that’s nice.

But sometimes you have a little bit more work to do as a growth marketer.

“Performance marketers and large scale digital marketers have sort of reached a plateau in their opportunity for optimization in search and social; they’re looking for alternative channels,” he says. “They’re also, I think, starting to feel the fatigue in their users … that direct response can’t be the only way they communicate to people: not everyone is ready to buy now. Some of them need a little education. Some of them might need to learn about your brand before they’re ready.”

It’s nice to just pick apples. But sometimes you have to plant a tree.

Video — and especially longer-form non-skippable video — is pretty good at telling those kinds of stories. Or so Disney says.

Boosting CTV ad conversion rates: so many options

One thing that shocked me when researching in preparation for this podcast was how many different kinds of ad placements Roku offers. We all know that Meta and Google offer dozens if not hundreds of different types of ad placements (you can fact-check me here if you disagree!)

But for CTV, you kinda think it’s the typical 15 or 30-second full-screen video.

Nope.

While that is the backbone and the foundation of advertising on Roku as well as other CTV platforms and ad networks, there’s actually a lot more. Just a few of the ones I found include:

• Marquee ads on the Roku home screen
• Roku City ads into Roku’s screensaver
• Ads in custom themes for Roku’s UI
• Spotlight ads on device activation
• Brand showcases
• Sponsored playlists
• Movie or season pass ads
• Standard video ads
• Pause ads when people pause their shows
• OK-to-text ads when an overlay prompts people to get more info
• OK to email … same thing but via email
• Scannable video ads with QR codes

That’s a much bigger list than I anticipated. The marketing benefit is that, although you’ll probably most go with the standard video ads, there are other options when a highly targeted opportunity comes up to attract attention from a niche audience.

Much more in the full podcast

Check out the full conversation in the video above, and don’t forget to subscribe to Growth Masterminds wherever you get your podcasts!