How Roku Can Promote Free Movies to Smart TV Viewers

Roku isn’t just the top-selling manufacturer of smart TVs in the country. The brand also offers its own advertising-based video-on-demand (AVOD) service, offering viewers willing to watch a few advertisements the opportunity to stream popular content for free. Each month, Roku adds a number of movies and TV shows to its library. The haul in June 2022 included classics like Independence Day, Speed, and Pretty Woman: good news, right? The problem is that Roku deals in the world of streaming TV, a world in which different providers are constantly competing to tell consumers about the dozens of new additions to their own content libraries. In promoting the content in its AVOD library, Roku is in the awkward position of competing with the very streamers the company is connecting its customers to.

But Roku has a few advantages over the likes of Netflix and Co. First, it can market directly to its users either on their home screens (Roku recently let Disney+ do this to promote its new show Obi-Wan Kenobi), or on the “billboards” that appear in Roku City, the OTT interface’s charming cityscape screensaver. Second, Roku knows which users are watching particular streaming services, because they have to download to their smart TVs the applications that allow them to use these services. So Roku can use that information to personalize advertising viewers are certain to see, enticing them to use Roku’s AVOD service. Ranker Insights data can help.

Finding the Connections

We took a look at some of the 26 free films being added to Roku’s AVOD service and used Insights to determine which TV shows fans of those movies were most likely to love. Why TV shows? Because, at least in the data we found, the TV shows movie fans loved were more likely to stick around on one streaming service than the movies — either because the shows are originals produced by the streaming services, or because of ongoing deals between streamers and other TV producers (such as Hulu’s deal with FX or Netlix’s expiring deal with The CW). For example, we found that people who love Independence Day are more likely to love The Mandalorian than any other show on TV. It’s fair to say that a large portion of Disney+ users have seen The Mandalorian, so it might be a smart investment for Roku to advertise Independence Day to these subscribers specifically.

Here are some of the connections we found between popular TV shows and movies that were added to the Roku AVOD catalog in June 2022.

• Taken fans are 3X more likely to love 24 

• Maze Runner franchise fans are 4X more likely to love The 100, 3X more likely to love The Flash, and 2X more likely to love Once Upon a Time (Disney+)

• Speed fans are 2X more likely to love 24

• Cast Away fans are 3X more likely to love Band of Brothers

• Signs fans are 2X more likely to love Fringe

• Tombstone fans are 3X more likely to love Deadwood, Band of Brothers, and Justified

• Fight Club fans are 3X more likely to love It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Freaks and Geeks, and Archer

• Pretty Woman fans are 4X more likely to love Sex and the City and 3X more likely to love Friends and Full House

• Fifty Shades of Grey fans are 1X more likely to love The Vampire Diaries

• The Waterboy fans are 3X more likely to love The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Saved by the Bell, and Full House

• Goosebumps fans are 3X more likely to love Archer and Bob’s Burgers

• Bridesmaids fans are 4X more likely to love Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and 3X more likely to love Orange Is the New Black

• Napoleon Dynamite fans are 4X more likely to love Freaks and Geeks and The Office, and 3X more likely to love It’s Always Sunny, Bob’s Burgers, and Parks and Recreation

• The Descendants fans are 1X more likely to love Once Upon a Time and Mad Men

• Juno fans are 3X more likely to love Freaks and Geeks

Analyzing the Results

To make the most of all this data, we thought we’d use it to create Roku City billboards, a display ad format that would allow Roku to advertise the availability of multiple movies at once. By connecting the movies above to different TV shows, and by connecting those TV shows to the places where they stream, we were able to create Roku City ads specifically designed for users who subscribe to some of the biggest, most popular streaming platforms on the market.

To Disney+ subscribers, Insights suggests using ad creative featuring Independence Day, The Maze Runner Franchise, and The Descendants

To Hulu subscribers, Insights suggests using ad creative featuring Fight Club, Goosebumps, and Napoleon Dynamite

To HBO Max subscribers, Insights suggests using ad creative featuring Pretty Woman, Tombstone, and Cast Away

To Peacock subscribers, use ad creative featuring Napoleon Dynamite, The Waterboy, and Juno

To Netflix subscribers, use ad creative featuring The Maze Runner franchise, the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, and Bridesmaids

To Amazon Prime subscribers, Ranker Insights suggests using ad creative featuring Taken, Speed, and Signs

Bringing it All Together

This is just one example of how Roku might use Insights data to better market the content on its AVOD service to users looking for quality, highly popular movies without having to fork over the money to rent them. They might also consider mixing and matching these recommendations for viewers who use multiple streaming services: for example, someone who uses Netflix, HBO Max, and Amazon might see a billboard featuring Bridesmaids, Pretty Woman, and Speed.

Like any content provider or streaming service, the data Roku has on the tastes of its viewers are limited: You can tell whether people watched a given movie on your platform, for example, but you can’t get a sense of whether they liked that movie or not. Insights makes it easier to take the pieces of data you already have about your consumers and connect them into a more complete portrait that will make for stronger, more efficient marketing campaigns and more users getting access to exactly the content they want.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

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