CTV Platform, Roku, has signed on its biggest brand partnership deal yet and this time it’s come as a three packaged deal. Coca-Cola, Henkel and Scotts have all signed on to sponsor three shows; Emeril Tailgates, Children Ruin Everything and Martha Gardens.

For Roku’s head of original content David Eilenberg, who joined the company earlier this year, lifestyle content made sense for these partnerships. “It’s a category that has a lot of affinity for advertisers, sometimes in super obvious ways, sometimes less so,” Eilenberg said. “It’s a category that speaks to warmth, home and joy, and a lot of the things that those types of shows communicate, even advertisers that may not be directly having products that connect to the shows are showing interest in these programs.”

Lifestyle series also lend themselves to shoppable formats since viewers want to utilise the information they learn from the shows for their own home improvement.

Coca-Cola sponsored the entire season of chef Emeril Lagasse’s series Emeril Tailgates. “Coca-Cola’s partnership with Roku and Chef Emeril Lagasse is a prime example of how we are consciously evolving our strategic marketing approach to ensure we’re authentically connecting with our consumers around our shared passions of food and sports,” Robin Triplett, head of E2E connections and media at Coca-Cola, said. “In partnership with Roku and in collaboration with Chef Emeril, we created original content that leaned into our audiences’ areas of interest across culture, food and sports.”

Scotts and Martha Gardens is the largest program of the three, which Roku attributed to Stewart being a fan of the product.

Martha Gardens is released monthly, allowing viewers to watch Stewart’s actual garden in Bedford, NY, progress throughout the fall. The series included a Scotts integration, a native home screen banner and tune-in reminders when a new episode was launching and custom vignettes.

Henkel was a sponsor of the first season of Children Ruin Everything. The show is now category exclusive to them for the length of the sponsorship. Using Roku’s targeting, only viewers who had not watched the season saw Henkel branding and sponsorship.

“It was net new content, net new show that Henkel was bringing to them, which was really exciting and that’s a very turnkey way that we can work with these brands,” said Wachter.

Roku first launched its branded content studio in 2021 and debuted Roku Originals a month later. The company is still new to the original space but is working to quickly scale in terms of both content and partnerships.

In October, Roku partnered with T-Mobile for Weird, its biggest original yet, and launched a 360 activation both on- and off-platform.

“The next phase for us is going to be a lot about activations of different sorts, both on-platform and off,” Eilenberg said. “We’ve had great experiences so far, and now it’s what other behaviours do we want our viewers to engage in, on their own behalf and on behalf of the brand that’s partnering with us on the activation?”