Fewer Signals, Better Signals: Roku Bets on Data Quality to Make CTV a Performance Channel
CANNES, France – As streaming captures nearly half of all U.S. TV viewing time, advertisers are drowning in data signals – yet still struggling to prove that CTV campaigns actually drive business outcomes. Roku thinks the answer isn’t more data; it’s better data, shared more deliberately.
That philosophy is reshaping how the company approaches its agency relationships, moving well beyond transactional media deals toward something closer to infrastructure partnerships. Agencies are building marketing operating systems to plan, buy, activate, and measure media, and Roku wants its data cloud to be a native input into those systems.
“There’s no shortage of noise when it comes to data. There’s a lot of signals in the space today, and I think what clients and agencies need is less signals and better signals,” said Sal Candela, VP of global agency partnerships at Roku, in a video interview with Beet.TV at the Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions.
The operating system advantage
Roku’s core argument rests on its position as the number-one TV operating system in the United States. Because Roku sits at the OS layer – rather than inside a single app or streaming service – it sees consumer behavior across the entire television glass, regardless of what a viewer is watching or where.
That vantage point, Candela argued, gives agencies something qualitatively different from what they can get elsewhere. “We have a lot of consumer behaviors that we are collecting in a privacy-compliant way that enables agencies to think about how do they target the consumers they’re looking for, how do they do that more effectively and efficiently, how do they do audience matching,” he said.
The privacy-compliant framing is not incidental. Regulatory pressure on CTV data practices is intensifying: California’s DELETE Online and Opt-out from Data Exploitation (DROPE) system, which began processing deletion requests in August 2026, explicitly includes connected TV IDs among the identifiers consumers can submit.
Interoperability as a competitive stance
Candela said that Roku views data sharing as a responsibility, rather than a commercial lever. In an industry where platforms routinely treat proprietary data as a moat, Roku is pitching openness – at least selectively – as a strategic identity.
“We take a lot of pride in being an interoperable platform,” Candela said. “We believe that as the number one TV operating system in the US, we have a responsibility to share our data in a privacy-compliant way for the betterment of the industry, for the betterment of advertisers and our agency partners. We believe that the industry goes further when we move together.”
That posture has translated into a series of concrete integrations.
- In June 2026, Roku announced a partnership with Smartly connecting the creative and campaign management platform to Roku Ads Manager via the Roku Ads API, designed to bring social-style campaign speed and measurability into CTV.
- Earlier, in April 2026, Roku launched Roku Curate, packaging its own data with purchase signals from Best Buy Ads, Criteo, Instacart, Kroger, and others to support closed-loop measurement and audience activation.
From branding to performance
The broader market is demanding this kind of evolution. Emarketer forecasts U.S. CTV ad spending will grow 14.5% in 2026 to nearly $38 billion, describing the year as one defined by measurement maturity and performance accountability rather than raw reach. Meanwhile, Nielsen’s May 2026 Gauge report found streaming accounting for 48.6% of total U.S. TV watch time – a viewing reality that makes advertisers more demanding about proof of performance, not less.
“There’s a big opportunity in making CTV more performant, and that’s something that we’re very much focused on at Roku,” Candela said. “The ability to move from insight to action and being able to compress that timeline is the way in which you would want to work with a TVOS like Roku.”
The outcomes ambition is being tested in the market. A January 2026 expansion of Roku’s partnership with iSpot for outcome-based optimization reported that early testing with home security brand SimpliSafe produced a 23% increase in leads and a 31% increase in website visits for the optimized group versus a control group – the kind of lower-funnel proof point that has historically been hard to produce from television advertising.
“It gives brands and advertisers the ability to connect with our data in a much more rapid fashion, makes them a little bit more agile in doing so, and ultimately helps them perform better from a campaign perspective,” Candela said.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lions 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
CANNES, France – As streaming captures nearly half of all U.S. TV viewing time, advertisers are drowning in data signals – yet still struggling to prove that CTV campaigns actually drive business outcomes. Roku thinks the answer isn’t more data; it’s better data, shared more deliberately.
That philosophy is reshaping how the company approaches its agency relationships, moving well beyond transactional media deals toward something closer to infrastructure partnerships. Agencies are building marketing operating systems to plan, buy, activate, and measure media, and Roku wants its data cloud to be a native input into those systems.
“There’s no shortage of noise when it comes to data. There’s a lot of signals in the space today, and I think what clients and agencies need is less signals and better signals,” said Sal Candela, VP of global agency partnerships at Roku, in a video interview with Beet.TV at the Beet.TV Leadership Sessions at Cannes Lions.
The operating system advantage
Roku’s core argument rests on its position as the number-one TV operating system in the United States. Because Roku sits at the OS layer – rather than inside a single app or streaming service – it sees consumer behavior across the entire television glass, regardless of what a viewer is watching or where.
That vantage point, Candela argued, gives agencies something qualitatively different from what they can get elsewhere. “We have a lot of consumer behaviors that we are collecting in a privacy-compliant way that enables agencies to think about how do they target the consumers they’re looking for, how do they do that more effectively and efficiently, how do they do audience matching,” he said.
The privacy-compliant framing is not incidental. Regulatory pressure on CTV data practices is intensifying: California’s DELETE Online and Opt-out from Data Exploitation (DROPE) system, which began processing deletion requests in August 2026, explicitly includes connected TV IDs among the identifiers consumers can submit.
Interoperability as a competitive stance
Candela said that Roku views data sharing as a responsibility, rather than a commercial lever. In an industry where platforms routinely treat proprietary data as a moat, Roku is pitching openness – at least selectively – as a strategic identity.
“We take a lot of pride in being an interoperable platform,” Candela said. “We believe that as the number one TV operating system in the US, we have a responsibility to share our data in a privacy-compliant way for the betterment of the industry, for the betterment of advertisers and our agency partners. We believe that the industry goes further when we move together.”
That posture has translated into a series of concrete integrations.
- In June 2026, Roku announced a partnership with Smartly connecting the creative and campaign management platform to Roku Ads Manager via the Roku Ads API, designed to bring social-style campaign speed and measurability into CTV.
- Earlier, in April 2026, Roku launched Roku Curate, packaging its own data with purchase signals from Best Buy Ads, Criteo, Instacart, Kroger, and others to support closed-loop measurement and audience activation.
From branding to performance
The broader market is demanding this kind of evolution. Emarketer forecasts U.S. CTV ad spending will grow 14.5% in 2026 to nearly $38 billion, describing the year as one defined by measurement maturity and performance accountability rather than raw reach. Meanwhile, Nielsen’s May 2026 Gauge report found streaming accounting for 48.6% of total U.S. TV watch time – a viewing reality that makes advertisers more demanding about proof of performance, not less.
“There’s a big opportunity in making CTV more performant, and that’s something that we’re very much focused on at Roku,” Candela said. “The ability to move from insight to action and being able to compress that timeline is the way in which you would want to work with a TVOS like Roku.”
The outcomes ambition is being tested in the market. A January 2026 expansion of Roku’s partnership with iSpot for outcome-based optimization reported that early testing with home security brand SimpliSafe produced a 23% increase in leads and a 31% increase in website visits for the optimized group versus a control group – the kind of lower-funnel proof point that has historically been hard to produce from television advertising.
“It gives brands and advertisers the ability to connect with our data in a much more rapid fashion, makes them a little bit more agile in doing so, and ultimately helps them perform better from a campaign perspective,” Candela said.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage from Cannes Lions 2026. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
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