Roku Head of Growth Marketing Jonathan Kriner Talks CTV Marketing Strategy

When Jonathan Kriner tells people he works at Roku, they often picture the little set-top streaming device plugged into their TV. But Roku today is much more than hardware. The company has grown into a robust ecosystem, a content producer, and advertising platform. As Head of Growth Marketing and Brand for Roku’s advertising business, Kriner sits at the crossroads of all three, translating Roku’s massive reach into advertising growth, and establishing Roku as a must-have channel for marketers of all sizes. We sat down with Kriner to learn more about his process.

Watch the full interview below, or read on for a selection of key takeaways.
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Rewriting the CTV Playbook for New Advertisers

When Kriner joined Roku nearly six years ago, streaming TV was already booming. Yet Roku’s ad business back then was dominated by big brands with big budgets. “Historically the ad business has been almost exclusively big enterprise advertisers… hundreds of the advertisers you see on TV all the time,” Kriner says. “And I think that’s what we’re trying to change. Instead of it being hundreds… how do we go to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and make that opportunity grow?” Growth-stage companies, startups, and even local businesses that had never thought TV ads were within reach.

For these new entrants, CTV (connected TV) came with both allure and intimidation. On one hand, more eyeballs are shifting to streaming by the day. “Lots of advertisers are coming to streaming because that’s where the audiences are. That’s where the eyeballs are,” Kriner says. “Unlike traditional linear TV, it’s steeped in digital. We can track how it leads to page views… that digital connectivity… makes it more accountable, to drive performance.” 

On the other hand, many smaller advertisers still viewed TV as either too expensive, too complex, or just too “brand-only.” Convincing a scrappy D2C startup or a regional insurance company to add TV to their Facebook/Google ad mix wasn’t simple. “TV has felt inaccessible… the entire landscape has made it ripe for … performance marketers to really enter the CTV space, which we’re certainly seeing”, Kriner observes. Changing that perception was a core challenge.

Adding to the challenge, Roku’s year-old ad platform, Roku Ads Manager, was (and still is) evolving rapidly. “A year might sound like a long time, but… we’re standing up the infrastructure. We’re investing in the MarTech strategy. We’re still hiring the team… Our product is changing every couple of months, we’re releasing big new features that might change the entire use case for certain types of advertisers,” Kriner explains. In short, building a self-serve ads business inside a larger company means racing to meet the market’s needs while the car is still being assembled. “Sometimes we can move really fast. Sometimes… we can move faster by being a little slower,” he says of working within Roku’s broader operations. Balancing startup agility with corporate scale is a tricky high-wire act – one that makes Kriner’s role uniquely challenging.

Building a Self-Serve Ad Engine from Scratch

To tackle these challenges, Kriner and his team took a multifaceted approach. Over the past year, they laid a foundation of data, tools, and partnerships to onboard and accelerate new advertisers in Roku Ads Manager. Kriner describes it as doing unglamorous homework before scaling up. “We spent a lot of time over the last year really getting the media mix up and running so we can understand how much does it cost for us to acquire an advertiser? What is our real benchmark from sign up to creating an ad account, to launching a campaign? How long does it take, on average, from sign up to spend?” They instrumented every step of the funnel. Instead of assuming that “if you build it, they will come,” Kriner’s team measured it: cost per sign-up, activation rates, time-to-first-launch. Those insights now guide their strategy.

With baseline metrics in hand, optimizing the funnel became the next focus. “Now we’re thinking a lot about, well, how do we influence each of those funnels?” Kriner says. “How do we use media to maybe accelerate a sign up through to spend? How do we use different lifecycle marketing? How should we use our sales team?” Roku set up lifecycle email campaigns and in-product prompts to nudge new advertisers from one milestone to the next. At the same time, Roku stood up a “robust sales team” for those who needed extra help – people who “ask for a demo, have folks who can give them demos.”

To make this scalable, Kriner invested heavily in MarTech. “Step one… is how do we get the right foundation of technology to help us automate and enrich data as much as we can,” he explains. When a new advertiser signs up, Roku now tries to instantly learn a bit about them, “what vertical they’re in, how big their organization is” – even if all they provided was a Gmail address. Third-party data enrichment, analytics, and CRM workflows all play a part. The goal is to tailor the onboarding experience based on who the customer is. A savvy app marketer might blaze through setup and just need advanced tips, whereas a local business might need the CTV 101 treatment. Kriner’s team is building triggers and segments so that “they get the right question and answer, the right onboarding experience” at the right time.

Another major action was expanding Roku’s partner ecosystem. Kriner knows Roku can’t solve every advertiser need alone, so they opened up the platform. By offering APIs for campaign management, reporting, audience tracking and more, Roku invites external developers and agencies to plug into Roku Ads Manager. “We’ve partnered with folks on the creative side, like Spaceback and Waymark and Streamr.AI to figure out how to do things like creative,” Kriner says. These partnerships let advertisers easily create video ads or adapt social creatives into TV format, lowering the creative barrier to entry. Roku is also integrating with measurement partners (for example, a recent AppsFlyer partnership to tie Roku ad exposure to mobile app installs) and even commerce platforms. In fact, Roku’s Ads Manager launched with a Shopify integration that lets viewers instantly purchase via their remote, a first in CTV. By connecting these dots, Kriner’s team is ensuring that Roku’s self-serve advertisers can leverage familiar tools and see tangible outcomes.

Momentum, Scale, and a New Story for TV Ads

A year into this grand experiment, Kriner’s efforts are bearing fruit. Roku Ads Manager has attracted a mix of advertisers that would make any growth marketer smile. “We’re seeing a wide diversity of advertisers find success through the Ads Manager platform,” Kriner reports. “B2B advertisers like Rollo… to insurance companies like Freeway Insurance to mobile marketers like Fliff… a lot of really great different types of advertisers coming into the platform and saying, OK, streaming is a part of the media mix.” 

Internally, Kriner’s cross-functional team has gelled into a “startup within a company” driving this new growth. “We’re lean, we’re scrappy. And we found a lot of great product–market fit… that pace, you just kind of feel it,” he says of the Roku Ads Manager group. It’s a palpable momentum that energizes him.

Perhaps the most important result of all is a new narrative for TV advertising. Kriner and his team have proven that CTV can work for the growth-minded marketer, not just the big spender. Along the way, they’ve learned to continually refine their story. It’s been “a constant iterative journey to make sure that we’re telling the right stories in the right ways,” Kriner reflects. Early on, that meant dispelling myths. Now it’s about showcasing success stories from the diverse advertisers who took the leap. Kriner understands that performance marketers talk – “if we continue to deliver it… we also want to amplify and make sure that those stories get told in the right ways”. In the growth marketing world, a ringing endorsement from a peer can be gold. Roku is starting to get those, and Kriner is intent on turning them into a virtuous cycle of adoption.

CTV’s New Mainstream

As streaming overtakes legacy TV and CTV ad spend soars past $30 billion, the stakes for Roku – and Kriner – couldn’t be higher. Fortunately, he’s not alone in this journey. Roku’s CEO and founder had long predicted “the future of TV will all be streamed,” and that future is now. The next frontier is ensuring that performance marketers fully embrace it. Kriner sees a world where adding a TV channel to your growth plan is as easy as spinning up a Facebook campaign. “TV has felt inaccessible and I just think the entire landscape has made it ripe for performance marketers to really enter the CTV space, which we’re certainly seeing”, he says. In other words, the doors are open and the early results are encouraging. Roku’s not just selling streaming players anymore; it’s selling outcomes, from app installs to insurance quotes, delivered on the biggest screen in the house.

CTV is no longer a niche or a nice-to-have, but a viable, data-driven part of the funnel. And thanks to innovators like Jonathan Kriner, it’s becoming accessible to brands of any size. Kriner has blended the art of storytelling with the science of growth to crack the CTV code. The result? A Roku that’s as synonymous with advertising opportunity as it is with streaming entertainment. And as performance marketers continue to pile in, the old adage rings true: the revolution will not be televised it will be streamed.

At Bidease, we believe the future of advertising is fully transparent, data-driven, and built for performance. Want to take your media mix to the next level? Let’s talk.