The rebirth of TV's ‘oldest trend’  

Roku’s David Eilenberg on how market shifts have brought advertisers back into the content-financing equation and why brands, which have so far gravitated towards streamers’ unscripted content, might be coming for specific scripted genres. 

David Eilenberg

Over the past two years, every major global streaming service, with the exception of Apple TV+, has reoriented its strategy to one degree or another around building out an advertising business.

When the streaming bubble began to burst in 2022, SVoDs hurried to launch ad tiers to help stem the bleeding inflicted by the years of heavy investment – many would now characterise it as over-investment – in subscriber acquisition.

At the same time, AVoD platforms including The Roku Channel, Tubi and Amazon’s Freevee began to expand their focus on original programming as a way to complement their acquired offerings as the battle for eyeballs intensified.

These moves have brought advertisers and brands into the streaming equation in a major way. However, it hasn’t been simple.

Most reports indicate the major US streamers still only account for a relatively small amount of overall digital advertising. But those revenues will continue to grow as streamers put their foot to the floor on their advertising and brand-funded content strategies. Amazon has perhaps made the biggest moves of all this year, shifting Prime Video users by default onto a newly launched ad-supported tier and retooling its AVoD business around a new brand strategy led by Lauren Anderson, head of brand and content innovation at Amazon MGM Studios. But across the board, almost every streaming service is making major moves.

So what exactly constitutes brand-funded content in the streaming age?

David Eilenberg, head of content for Roku Media, defines it as the following: “Advertisers and media agencies becoming more involved in both the financing and execution of content, earlier and more often, as we pivot towards this next stage of streaming and content more generally.”

Roku original Side Hustlers, a competition series following female entrepreneurs

The veteran exec, who joined Roku in 2022 after previously serving as chief creative officer at ITV America, spoke at C21’s Content Canada earlier this month about how the notion of brand-funded content has changed – and remained the same – as audiences have transitioned from linear to streaming platforms.

“It’s the oldest trend in TV. To some extent, it’s been around since the 1950s,” he said during an interview with Jamie Schouela, president of global channels and media at Toronto-based Blue Ant Media.

And while there are new business models evolving around branded content, and new entrants in the space, some of the brands such as Proctor & Gamble have been involved in content “since the beginning of television,” Eilenberg pointed out.

The trend lines, he argued, are definitive: “brands are once again becoming much more central to the content ecosystem at large.”

One example is the Roku original Side Hustlers, a competition series following female entrepreneurs as they develop and grow their side businesses with the goal of quitting their day jobs. The genesis of that project was a partnership between US bank Ally Financial and Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine. Those two entities struck a partnership before they approached Roku, explained Eilenberg, for a deal he described as a “distribution, marketing and partnership solution on the streaming side.”

The Next Black Millionaires

The Roku Channel also commissioned The Next Black Millionaires, a docuseries following entrepreneurs attempting to grow their passions into million-dollar businesses, in partnership with consumer goods giant Unilever and Macro Television Studios.

“When a brand has a message they want to get out and they meet a producer/creative first who has a vision for how to execute that message in an entertaining way, that seems to yield really good results,” he said.

Eilenberg encouraged producers to think about areas where there is a growing demand from brands. One such area is women’s sports, where he said there is “so much energy from an audience standpoint, from an attendee standpoint and then, needless to say, from an advertiser standpoint.”

To date, advertisers and brands have been more active in aligning themselves with unscripted programming compared to scripted programming. There are several reasons for that, suggested Eilenberg.

“Some of that is due to price point, but it’s also the way that unscripted and scripted have evolved more generally. In its essence, unscripted has become very brand and family friendly, especially with its biggest franchises. Scripted, in recent years, has distinguished itself a lot by being TV-MA and pushing the envelope,” he said.

That “may change,” noted Eilenberg, who added he believes “there are ways for brands to engage in scripted fare and underwrite certain types of scripted content.”

He predicts brands will look to become more heavily involved in streaming movies, which he believes is an area relatively ripe for investment.

“My supposition is that initially it’s going to be in the straight-to-streaming feature space. And unsurprisingly, I think you’re already starting to see brands expressing interest in scripted holiday features and brand-friendly family comedies of a certain sort,” he said. “There’s a really long history of this that is just starting to peek its head back up. I would imagine there’s going to be some direct investment coming pretty soon.”