Where Roku stands after Walmart bought Vizio
Months after the merger of one of its competitors and a key retail advertising partner, Roku finds itself in a crucial moment to remain competitive.
Walmart completed its roughly $2.3 billion purchase of Vizio in December, giving the nation’s largest retailer an in-house way to reach tens of millions of connected TV screens. Vizio now has inherent advantages in being part of Walmart in the competitive race for brands’ advertising dollars. Tying in the retailer’s extensive shopper data and Walmart Connect retail media network will increase Vizio’s allure for marketers wanting to understand exactly how advertising over streaming platforms can affect retail transactions.
Roku’s ad business is instead dependent on partnering with retailers, including Walmart, to get access to shopper data, but remains several times larger as a TV platform. In January, Roku said it reached 90 million televisions, dongles and other streaming devices. Vizio reported only 19 million-plus active accounts at the end of last year. The Roku Channel also makes up a significant chunk of all monthly streaming at 2.2%, just behind Paramount (2.3%) and Prime Video (3.5%), according to Nielsen. Roku’s platform revenue — which includes advertising as well as its streaming services — reached $3.5 billion in 2024, up 18% year over year, according to Roku’s year-end letter to shareholders.
To differentiate itself in this competitive environment and take advantage of its large market share, Roku’s focus as an advertising platform lies in strengthening and deepening its existing partnerships with retailers through unique ad experiences, its co-head of enterprise ad sales, Sarah Monahan, told Modern Retail. The company has increasingly been focused on luring CPG and DTC advertisers over the past few years.
“We’re extremely well-positioned because we’ve taken a very focused effort to develop partnerships across the connected TV space that enable a brand to execute how they want, access our inventory how they want, target how they want, measure how they want and do that leveraging what we think are some of the best — if not the best — ad experiences in connected TV,” she said.
In 2022 and 2023, the company struck deals with Walmart, DoorDash, Wendy’s, Best Buy, Instacart and Shopify on shoppable ads, data sharing or promotions, varying from partner to partner. The partnerships have since slowed down, as Roku largely chose to go deeper with its existing partners, Monahan said.
Roku stands out compared to Walmart’s Vizio as one of the pioneers in streaming TV ad deals and for its large market share, said Andrew Lipsman, a retail media analyst and consultant for Media, Ads + Commerce.
“It’s a parallel strategy; at the end of the day, the basic assets are the same — it’s really good cross-category, first-party retail data, powering ads across streaming TV inventory,” Lipsman said, cautioning that Roku’s reliance on partnerships requires much more coordination to connect data and get sales teams on the same page than being in-house at a retailer. “The differences are really based on the scale of the inventory, and then the extent that partnership dependency adds friction to the process.”
Monahan said there are still some future opportunities for Roku to partner with retailers, and the company plans to announce them in the coming months. She wouldn’t share what kind of retailers it’s looking to partner with, but said the company has especially been paying attention to the needs of CPG advertisers.
“Retail in particular is probably one of the most interesting categories for us,” she said. “[Retailers and brands] have quickly evolved and really adapted our concept of using the entire platform to tell stories, to drive consideration and even to drive conversions.”
Driving shopping behavior through interactivity
Over the past two years, Roku has been working to create more unique ad experiences outside of in-stream video, Monahan explained.
For example, she highlighted that its marquee home screen ad is now available to other enterprise clients. That spot was previously reserved for media and entertainment advertisers and reaches over 125 million people each day, according to Roku. Retailers can use that prominent placement to drive customers to features like virtual showrooms, which can lead to purchases.
Roku also opened up its Roku City screensaver to brands in 2023. There, retailers can direct customers to where they can shop or learn more about products.
“We’ve had almost every big-box, specialty retailer create moments in Roku City,” Monahan said. “If I move away from my Roku device and the screen saver, which is Roku City, comes on, all of a sudden, I’m also seeing a physical building that looks just like the Home Depot that I walk by on 23rd and 6th Ave [in New York City].”
Roku partnered with Walmart Connect in June 2022, running ads for brands like Hellmann’s, for which the company created a Super Bowl campaign with interactive video spots that enabled viewers to buy groceries directly from Walmart. Despite Walmart’s Vizio acquisition, Roku’s relationship with the retailer, so far, is business as usual, according to Monahan. She declined to comment on whether there’s an end date on that partnership.
“For right now, we’re focused on continuing to build and strengthen that partnership,” she said. “We’ve been able to use that [partnership] to help inform how we think about a partnership with Shopify, so that more of our mid- to long-tail partners can take advantage of native checkout through our self-service tool as a manager.”
New priorities under new leadership
Roku also saw several departures of ad executives and new hires over the last couple of years, driving new priorities for the company.
In November 2023, NBCUniversal named Roku’s vp of global ad revenue and marketing solutions, Alison Levin, its president of advertising and partnerships. Just over a year later, Roku vp of global advertising sales and partnerships, Kristina Shepard, departed for NBCU, as well.
Meanwhile, longtime ad executive Jay Askinasi joined Roku in 2024 from Publicis Groupe as svp and head of global media revenue and growth, and streaming sales veteran Lauren Benedict — previously with Spotter, a startup that provides funding for creators — came on in March with Shepard’s former title.
“[Askinasi] has really helped push forward a lot of our prioritization on partnerships and thinking about access to our data,” Monahan said, adding that Benedict, on the other hand, has pushed the company to “think about how to make [television advertising] more performant and how to create ad experiences that won’t just look like a traditional 30-second spot.”
Aside from Walmart-Vizio, the other elephants in the room are tariffs and constrained marketing budgets across the industry. Monahan said she hasn’t seen any disruption in Roku’s partnerships.
“We are certainly having an outsized amount of conversations with certain categories like auto to help them understand some of the scenario planning and how they might think about the next few quarters, depending on what happens,” she said. “We’re helping [brands] make sure everything is targeted and measured in a way that there’s zero waste.”