Best Buy and Roku Partner for Season-Long Brand Integration in Idea House

Roku and Best Buy are expanding their long-running partnership with a brand integration in The Roku Channel’s new original series Idea House: Mountain Modern. Best Buy serves as the key ad sponsor of the series, following husband-and-wife design/build team Jared and Amber Pfifer as they construct a new home in the Rocky Mountains. The series comes from This Old House, which Roku acquired last year as part of an expansive original content strategy. “We looked at all of the tools that [This Old House] had in their toolkit already,” Katina Papas Wachter, head of ad revenue strategy at The Roku Channel, told Adweek. “We knew on The Roku Channel that lifestyle content, especially throughout 2020, was growing substantially, and we wanted to almost meet the streamer where they were to program accordingly.” The 11-episode series is operating with a windowed release schedule. Best Buy products are featured throughout the show and a Best Buy home expert makes several appearances. The homeowners in the series also utilize the brand's virtual store's personalized services to outfit their home gym. The Roku Brand Studio also created four pieces of custom content for Best Buy, housed on a branded content destination on The Roku Channel along with current episodes of the show. There are also 30-second cut-downs from the integrations that feature interactive, shoppable overlays for streaming customers to buy Best Buy products seen in the Idea House. “While Best Buy was obviously excited to showcase all of these different aspects of their business and of their store within the show, they were also really agreeable to making sure it came off as editorial content and that they were making it endemic to the show, and not super ad-heavy,” Wachter said. “The purpose is definitely awareness. This is telling a deeper story than Best Buy would be able to do and a 30- or 15-second video ad. It's also to hit on more than just awareness and be a full-funnel program to remind the user throughout the show that Best Buy is involved, but also to actually allow them to engage with the brand,” she added. 'Branded but still editorial' The partnership is the first of many lifestyle executions that Roku has planned, initially teased during the company’s NewFronts presentation earlier this year. Idea House serves as the kickoff for further programming, including shows with Martha Stewart and Jessica Alba. In addition to branding on the home screen to promote Idea House, Roku also added pause ads throughout all of the episodes. “We didn’t have IP before the launch of Roku Originals, so this was really exploratory for us to figure out ways that brands would want to do this, striking that balance of it being branded, but still in an editorial voice so that the user wouldn’t be like ‘this feels icky.’ We feel that it's in a pretty lean-back way that's not hitting people over the heads,” Wachter said. In the premiere episode, the first ad viewers see in each ad pod is a Best Buy ad. Roku was able to utilize different creatives, so different audiences may have seen different advertisements. For Dan Suratt, vp at This Old House, protecting the brand's integrity was important in partnering with Best Buy. “People believe in the brand. They believe in what they’re learning. And that was really important in this integration, for it to be authentic and to be educational and informational,” he said. “I think when you combine trust, authenticity with real integration, it's a win for everybody.” Roku and Walmart Partner in Exclusive Streaming Ecommerce Offering