CMO Chats with Jonathan Kriner, Head of Ad Growth Marketing at Roku

Hi everyone, welcome to CMO Chat. My name is Jonathan Kriner, and I’m Head of Ad Growth Marketing at Roku.

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

I’ve kind of been in marketing my entire career, and I love the combination of storytelling and having an impact on business results. That’s a lot of where my team at Roku focuses—on driving growth for the ad business at Roku.

Thank you so much. What does your company do?

Yeah, Roku is really on a mission to make TV better for everyone. We’re the leader in streaming in North America, and part of that mission is the belief that all TV and all TV advertising will be streamed. That has implications for streamers, content producers, providers, and advertisers. I work on our advertising business, which is really focused on helping advertisers understand these shifts in consumer behaviour and where Roku and our ad products can really help grow their business.

As the Head of Ad Growth Marketing in your company, what is your current main marketing focus?

My team’s main focus is on accelerating our business. We’re called the Ad Growth Marketing Team, and we really try to deliver on that name. We’re constantly evaluating the impact our work has on our financials, finding areas that will drive ROI. At Roku, we focus on delivering simplicity and delight, and we extend that to advertisers. We want to ensure we’re easy to buy, we’re reaching our consumers, we’re driving performance, and providing a great experience. We spend a lot of time establishing Roku advertising in the market and building a community around those pillars—a community of customers, advocates, and innovation—making sure that it resonates with the market.

Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign that your team has recently executed?

Yeah, I’d love to. We’re just coming off, at least in the U.S. market, TV’s biggest moment—the upfronts, from April-May through to the summer. For those unaware, the upfront is a period where TV advertisers and their agencies commit to buying next year’s TV sponsorships upfront in exchange for benefits like better pricing and sponsorship opportunities for marquee shows.

In past years, we’ve talked a lot about Roku and what it is. In some ways, we’re an operating system or a platform. You can think of Roku for TV as similar to Android for mobile or Windows for PC, but that can be challenging for the ad market to understand. What does it mean for streamers to be an operating system or a platform? How do advertisers participate in that?

So, we created a campaign around the concept of a lead-in, which is a more traditional TV moment. Fifty years ago, the number one TV show in America was All in the Family, and on average, a third of all Americans watched it every week. To capitalise on that, CBS spun off The Jeffersons, running it right after All in the Family. It immediately had almost 60 million viewers and became the fourth most-watched show in America overnight. This concept of a lead-in—where one show’s success leads to the success of another—is something we found really resonated with the concept of a platform.

When you turn on your Roku, you see the Roku home screen experience before you watch content, whether it’s sports, comedy, video-on-demand, or a live-streaming TV channel. We wanted to bring this to life so that the ad market could understand what Roku as a platform means. It’s what you see when you turn on your TV. It can help people decide what to watch and become aware of things they might not have known about. One example I’m really excited about is our partnership with NBCU ahead of the Olympics.

From personal experience, I’ve watched more Olympic trials content and coverage than I ever have before. I spent a couple of hours watching women’s shot put qualifiers. I’m not even a shot put fan, but when I turned on the TV and saw the content featured, instead of spending 10 minutes searching for something to watch, I ended up watching this great coverage. That’s good for NBCU as a content provider, good for me as a streamer, and good for advertisers.

As part of the upfronts, we amplified that message with an event through the IAB. We really told that story, showcased our new products, and turned it into a big campaign with free content, paid promotion, press announcements, and more. It’s been really exciting to see the reaction from the market and from buyers—the lead-in concept made sense and helped define Roku’s role and how it can help the advertising ecosystem.

What are your biggest challenges in marketing right now?

For us, it’s that our business is complicated, and the world is complicated. Everything’s fragmented. On Roku’s side, we have devices with our own content channel (The Roku Channel), and we participate in the ad business through sponsorships and programmatic. We can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

As marketing continues to evolve, it’s crucial we know what we stand for. We must balance driving results with being a great consumer product while also maintaining simplicity and delight. That’s a challenge—making sure we’re moving forward with a cohesive vision of what we stand for as a brand.

How does Roku stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

Yeah, that’s a great question. Roku has been around since 2002, founded by Anthony Wood, who is still our CEO. We’ve competed against companies with much deeper pockets and bigger resources, yet we’ve remained the leader in TV streaming.

One thing I consistently point to is the focus. We say we want to make TV better for everyone, and we’re truly doing that, not just saying it. Streamers love streaming with Roku, and we deliver new products built specifically for streaming. We’ve created curated zones to make sports games easier to find. We have Roku City, a beloved screensaver that even advertisers can participate in—you can see Taylor Swift’s tour bus or celebrate Grimace’s birthday! These little touches help create a fun experience for streamers, which strengthens our engagement.

We’ve been able to reach households with an estimated 100 million people every day in the U.S. To put that into context, that’s like the size of the Super Bowl audience every single day on Roku from that home screen. 

I think that focus of really being around about the TV screen delivering those products to make consumers and streamers love Roku more has really served us well because we can take that scale and make it better for advertisers, make it more performant, and again, create that world where streamers, advertisers, and content providers all are able to succeed.

That’s amazing. Thank you for putting that into perspective. That’s more than the population of Italy altogether. I think Italy has about 65 million people, so there you go. That will put it into perspective for sure. What opportunities are available to CMOs today that may not have been available in the past?

We’ve been talking about it for a while, but I still think data—data access, data activation, data collection—continues to change the game for marketers. We invest heavily in our data and tech stack, and it enables us to move from talking about impressions and clicks to what really matters—revenue. Are we driving revenue? Are we shortening the time deal to close? Are we influencing deal size?

Data is still an underutilised and game-changing aspect for CMOs, and I think we’ll continue to see a shift in its importance. AI might also be another avenue, but at its core, it’s about how we collect and utilise data to learn what works and what doesn’t and grow our businesses accordingly.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

That’s a big, broad question, but a good one. On the opposite side of the data story, I actually think the future of marketing will rely even more on authenticity. People care about causes, purpose, points of view, and real change, and they want to see that from both companies and individuals.

With the rise of social media, data, and AI, it’s easier than ever to create and distribute content. But that means authentic marketing and authentic storytelling will be more important than ever to break through and be successful. So, I think the future of marketing will be grounded in authentic storytelling—making sure we’re telling the right stories in the right ways.

If you could describe the role of a CMO with one word, what would that word be and why?

I may be biased, but my team has “growth” in the job title, and I think that’s the right word—growth. If we’re not growing our business, and if we don’t know what’s driving that growth, I think we’re in trouble. The CMO role is about accelerating business growth through storytelling, campaigns, and activations. If we’re not driving growth, we’re in trouble.

What is a piece of traditional leadership advice that you think doesn’t apply to CMOs today?

The role of management is changing a lot. Fewer people want a boss, and more people want a coach. More people want to be part of a team versus work for someone or for an organisation.

While I think a lot of traditional management principles very much still apply in that shift, employee loyalty in the market has shifted. When it comes to great talent and retaining great talent, they need to be developed. It’s not from you; they’re going to find it elsewhere.

It creates a lot of opportunities for managers to think about how to make our people better. How do we create great teams? How do we make sure we feel part of something? It’s not my team, my org, my this. It’s the team charged with growing our business. How do we grow and win together?

That shift in mentality and management approach is going to be really important, especially as the market becomes more fragmented and we’re orchestrating things across huge amounts of digital content. Being all part of a team, being unified, and then having that individually tailored coaching plan for key talent, I think, is really important.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

Maybe not career advice, but I think we all could use a reminder that listening is really important. Listening to the market, listening to customers, partners, the team, finance, and Wall Street. We all feel pressure to talk, to ship, to create, to sound smart in interviews like these, but listening is kind of where the learning is and seeing where things are going and how we can tell our stories within where the marketing is going, I think is really important and hopefully a good reminder to listen more than we chat.

As VP of revenue marketing, what is currently your marketing focus?

My main focus is two things: at the simplest level, it’s acquiring new customers and then growing existing customers. On the acquisition side, we do that through demand generation, other acquisition channels, advertising, paid media, and such. The website, our SEO, and the self-serve funnel, as well as field marketing and events, are all focused on bringing in new customers into the funnel.

On the growing existing customer side, this is more of your growth marketing process. We’re testing and iterating across onboarding and lifecycle marketing, working with sales, and trying to create opportunities for self-serve accounts that are coming in with the opportunity to grow. I also oversee the marketing tech stack and all of our marketing operations and systems. What I try to do is get these things working in harmony. Because all of these are kind of squarely placed against the customer life cycle where we’re bringing them in, we’re nurturing and onboarding them all digitally, and then as they adopt the product and as they use more of the product, we try to grow those customers and introduce other features and products to them.

Can you tell us about a particularly memorable marketing campaign, whether it was particularly challenging or especially successful that you’ve executed recently?

Prior to DigitalOcean, I was at Google for seven years, and one of the things that really has stuck with me in, really, my whole career was during COVID when I was on Google Workspace. Team workspace is, you know, Gmail, Calendar, Doc, Slides, Meet, etc. This was when Zoom and the surge of video communication began; all of us were locked at home, and all of the chaos was going on. It was a great opportunity for Google to strategically bring Google Meet into that conversation. At the time, I was leading growth marketing for the workspace team, and we created a master class on how to get a team focused, mobilise that team, give them strategy, give them structure, and ultimately execute a really big vision.

We had maybe 50 people coming in and out of this work, streaming across daily stand-ups, regular syncs from a program management perspective, looking at metrics and reporting to leadership, and a full project scope. We had people from brand, media, the UX team, research, product, product marketing, growth marketing, sales, and even engineering sometimes. What was really, really amazing to me was that it could have been utter chaos. It could have been a complete disaster, right? You have that many people that many opinions, and that many agendas, and it wasn’t. It was just that everybody was so focused on what we were trying to do. Each person was completely content with their work stream, their tasks, and what they needed to do, and everyone had the autonomy to sort of own their own lane in the pool. That, in itself, was just amazing to be a part of. I’ve taken that with me and thought through it whenever I’m building a project team.

But the thing I was most personally proud of was on the growth side. What we did was figure out how to introduce Google Meet to existing workspace customers. So these were customers that were heavy users of probably Gmail and Calendar, maybe even docs and slides, and some of the collaborative document types. What we figured out was a way to extract some of the signals of what these customers were doing in these apps and then feed that into a predictive formula that would then introduce Google Meet at the right time. An example of this I’ll share is: let’s say you and two other folks in your workspace account are all in a document at the same time. Maybe you’re editing; you’re sort of interacting with each other. That’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, did you know you can actually take this document and share it directly and meet and have a quick huddle? ”You can see each other. You can have a conversation. Maybe that makes your collaboration a little bit easier. There were dozens and dozens of these experiments. But it was new. It was the beginning of what would later become a more solidified, cross-functional growth process. It was just a really profound opportunity to be a part of that when the world wasn’t at its best. We all found some solitude in that process.

What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I’ll share something I think is kind of general for the industry because I think that might be more relevant. I certainly face some of these, and I think a lot of them. When I talk to friends and colleagues in marketing positions, we’re all kind of hearing and saying the same thing. But I think what’s happened is that, particularly in B2B, the buyers that we’re trying to market to are extremely fatigued. In some cases, they’re annoyed, right? They’re tuning out our marketing. I think you see that in the data. You see website traffic start to go down, and you see impressions go down. You see advertising costs go up. It’s ultimately just harder to get in front of our buyers, on top of even just understanding who our buyers are.

The second thing is that I think over the last few years we, as marketers, really kind of overdid it. We had this surplus of budget and desire to grow during COVID. And so, what did we do? We did tons and tons of webinars, tons of digital content, tons of digital media, and tons of messages nonstop. We were able to distribute this on a scale we never had. Unfortunately, what we did was just saturate the market, and now, as a result, we’ve got these buyers who are engaging less with marketing, and I think, ultimately taking the sales process into their own hands. You see all these stats where the average sales deal the buyer has already completed, like 60% of the process before they even talk to a salesperson. In some cases, they want to do it all themselves. They want to go to a review site, they want to talk to peers, they may join a community, they look at social media, and they’re already formulating their opinion before they even talk to you. That’s a key sort of risk for marketing, where we typically try to influence that thought process before they talk to sales.

On top of that, you see budgets are down. Marketers are facing lower budgets, and they’re trying to do more with less. But also, for the companies that we’re selling to, their budgets are down, right? They might be investing less in certain types of software or certain types of processes. And so, all of these things happening at once kind of create this perfect storm where it’s just become a lot harder to market, is what I think. As a result of that, I believe it’s forcing the marketers to get back to some of the basics. We need to understand who our customers are and what pain points they’re trying to solve, and then creatively explain what our product or solution does to them. This is where you’ve got to find something unique and just simply use the channels that every other one of your competitors is using in a kind of mundane way. It’s just not going to cut it, right? You really have to focus on the customer and what they’re looking for, and then build around that.

What are some common trends that you have noticed different companies capitalise on to stay ahead of their competitors in terms of marketing?

Right now, I see two things really growing: One is the rise of the B2B social influencer. You go on LinkedIn now, and it is, it’s all; it’s either founders, CEOs, CMOs, or some sort of C-level that is positioning themselves as an influencer in their industry.

Then the second is communities. You can see how these things can actually work well together. But a lot of companies are investing in the community. I think the ones that had this sort of strategy in their DNA as a company before are doing really well because they’ve already got this built-in audience. And so, as I mentioned before, it’s getting a lot harder to reach that audience through media, essentially renting it from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or whatever you’re using as an ad platform. If you have that built-in community, you now have a leg up. You have a community of, hopefully, your prospects and customers that you can learn from. You can do research, understand what their pain points are and what they’re looking for, and then design products, solutions, and marketing around that. So, I think influencers and communities are really important right now.

But I think the catch here is that it’s like content. Simply creating content doesn’t drive growth or performance—it has to be good content. And so, on the influencer side, I think you see some who have kind of stumbled into this, and their posts just look like promotions for their company or their product, not really creating any value. You have to be a part of the conversation; you have to join the conversation and add value to it. It’s the same thing with communities, right? If you build up a community and all you do is advertise your product to them, you’ll likely not have a community very soon. I think it’s all about how you create value across these two channels and, ultimately, how you build and win the trust of your customers and position them to consider doing business with you.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Oh, I love this question. I think the answer is that it’s different. It’s going to look different. I’ve already made some, like, I guess, predictions you could call them from, say, six months ago, that are stale already. I think the big thing is that AI is obviously going to change a lot of marketing. But what I’m excited about is where AI strategically gets placed in your marketing supply chain. If you think about the entire marketing process across brand, creative, demand, generation, and operations, and how you’re showing up to meet buyers in their hypothetical journey, I think that’s the key. There are so many places where it can be valuable. And what you see now is kind of the first foray into AI, which was messaging and creative. You can now build content and copy and visuals and videos and audio just super, super easy—almost too easy—to an extent, where we really do run this risk of over-saturating and already saturated market content is just becoming a lot easier to create, but also harder to find and harder to consume.

The second area is workflow management with AI agents. This is where I’m really excited because you think about all of the mundane commodity tasks that a marketer might do, even just preparing a social post. They historically, maybe, went to a copywriter to get the copy, they went to a designer to get the design, and then they went to maybe a channel owner who’s going to craft all that together and put it into the channel, click Post, and then you’ve got a person who’s going to report on that. You’ve got agents now that can do most of that, and then you’re sort of managing these agents. I think that’s really cool. It also comes with some responsibility, right? If you’re sort of hyper-accelerating with crappy messages, it’s not going to do you well, right? You still need to be creative, but what you can do is speed up the delivery process.

Then the third one I think I’m particularly fond of, and I’m really keen to learn more about, is just predictive analytics and better insight creation through AI. In my career, a kind of pre-chat GPT coming up with insights requires a data scientist. Building a predictive model required a data engineer, a data analyst, and a lot of resources, and the results were great, right? You can really understand a lot about your customers by looking at that data, but I think I imagine a world where a lot of that is automated and streamlined. As you launch a campaign, you basically feed that campaign into some machine learning or predictive model, and it’s now looking for all the things that you’ve trained it to look for. As a result, it’s giving you much faster, more real-time insights that you can take action on. It could be simple things like changing creative or changing messaging, or it might be something more along the lines of, “Hey, your most valuable customers are doing X, Y, and Z before they take that action.” And so, it’s starting now to help you understand what the buyer journey is and doing that at a way more granular level. All customers are created equal; they’re all very, very, very different. Now you have this proliferation of buyer journeys that are driven by insights, and then you can take action on that, personalize messaging, and do all that fun stuff.

If you could describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be? and why?

I love this one. I think I just sort of came across this as an aha moment, but the word is servant. There’s a common description of servant leadership. As a leader, are you serving? I really want to understand what this means. There’s the leadership side, but even as a marketing team, you have to think about your role of serving customers, those on your team, your organisation, and then other areas in the company, right? Most businesses don’t succeed just because of marketing. I think you really need to be okay with that; you need to be humble that your role is to work with products, to work with product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations teams, and strategy teams, to bring the brand to life in the market, or to bring those products and solutions to market in a creative way. For me, the times where I felt the most successful are when I’ve been really tuned in to these other teams and really understand what they’re working on and what their goals are, and then I can bring that marketing perspective. Whatever it is, whether it’s from a creative side or it’s from more of an operational and growth side, either way, you know the value that you bring, and you’re working with these teams to execute.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders out there?

I thought about this one a bit, and where I landed was to control what you can control. Thinking about where I’ve been successful or felt the most successful is in the places where I didn’t get caught up in either politics, drama, changes in the organisation, or things that I just couldn’t control, right? Like, maybe the market’s down. I can’t really control that, right? But what I can control is my little slice of marketing, my team, and the people I work with.

In some cases, as I’ve personally grown through my career, most of my role changes were the result of reorganisation and new organisational design, which most people kind of commiserate around. “Oh, I don’t want this change. I don’t want to do that and this and that.” You can’t control the fact that it changed. But what you can control is how you show up, how you work with your new leader, and how you transition from the old leader. If you’re getting a new team or joining a new team, you can control how you show up there, and you can control your personality and your outlook. Those types of things, I think, go a really, really long way. I’ve tried to think about this and even the day-to-day. You can very quickly at work; just get thrown into a bunch of things that you realise you really have no control over. But find the thing you can control and just run with it. Do what you can do as well as you can, and block out what others are doing and the things that are out of your control.