Roku’s Lindsay Pullins on how CTV can help close the loop on the customer journey

Connected TV (CTV) and retail media seem to go hand in hand.

In fact, eMarketer projects that 15% of CTV ad dollars this year will come from retail media — up from about 12% in 2024.

Lindsay Pullins, director of business development and partnerships at Roku, sat down recently with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik to talk about this relationship between CTV and retail media and how it can drive closed-loop measurement.

Pullins even provides an example of a campaign that resulted in 65% of sales coming from Roku devices.

There’s a lot going on in the retail media and commerce space today. Tell me how Roku is showing up there.

We work with lots of different retailers from the likes of Walmart Connect or Instacart, Best Buy, Kroger Precision Marketing and many, many more. And it’s about showcasing the full-funnel experience and full-funnel outcomes that CTV can provide our customers. And what that means is our clients are able to access amazing first-party data for better targeting and closed-loop measurement and enhance that with shoppability.

Can you share an example of a brand that you think is doing a particularly good job of closing the loop on attribution? How are they doing it? What are they learning?

In our partnership with Walmart Connect, you can actually purchase an item directly from the Roku TV screen. And we did a campaign where we partnered with Waterpik, and what we found is that 65% of all sales were attributed to the actual purchase off of a Roku device, which is pretty impactful.

Wow. So someone was watching TV and decided to buy the Waterpik right there.

And in that campaign, of course, we were able to provide that full closed-loop measurement. So not only did they purchase on the Roku TV screen, but they later go in store and purchase. We were able to fully close the loop across the consumer journey.

What is your most unpopular opinion about advertising?

Combining brand and shopper to think together is going to benefit consumers, it’s going to benefit their brand and shopper dollars. … And I think it’s unpopular because it’s so hard right now.

A lot of organizations have different pockets of focus, whether it’s brand investment dollars or whether it’s shoppable dollars or shopper dollars, and maybe some innovation budgets in between. What is evident is — in this era where we have access to amazing data that these retail media networks and Roku have made available — it’s just more impactful if we bring those together, even though it’s really hard to do. But at Roku, we’ve seen a lot of success when those teams are collaborating.

What to you is the biggest unlock for companies that are trying to break down those silos?

The biggest unlock is being able to showcase the full-funnel results. If you are together in a room talking about what type of messaging and who you’re trying to reach and where and how, you are going to develop a much stronger and cohesive strategy — a targeting strategy, a measurement strategy — so that you can really see the full-funnel impact across all of the different channels that you’re activating on.