Roku announced last week that it had promoted Scott Rosenberg to GM of its high growth Platforms unit, and that company vet Steve Shannon was leaving the company at the end of 2017.

Rosenberg, who joined Roku in 2012, has been leading the company’s advertising business, and will now also head up Roku’s content distribution and related services. His expanded role was announced about three months following Roku’s IPO.

RELATED: Roku Rises in Nasdaq Debut

Roku’s Platforms unit includes advertising, subscription revenue sharing and license fees from TV makers that integrate Roku’s operating system. Revenues from that unit shot up 137%, to $57.52 million in Q3 2017.

Shannon also joined Roku 2012, coming on board to lead Roku’s new content and services group and to forge new industry relationships. He is also late of RealD Inc., Rovi (merged with TiVo in the fall of 2016), was a co-founder and president of OTT-VOD startup Akimbo Systems, and was as exec at ReplayTV, a DVR pioneer that was founded by current Roku CO Anthony Wood.

“Steve joined Roku in the early days of our monetization strategy and was instrumental in developing key advertising, content and services initiatives as well as recruiting top talent like Scott,” Wood said in a statement. “We are grateful for the contributions Steve made and wish him the very best as he moves on to his next great adventure.”

NEW YORK — Though there’s some frustration about set-top box video-on-demand advertising being undervalued, the category must continue to evolve, or risk getting overrun by other, more agile platforms.

Cable VOD advertising needs to get better and faster, “or it will fall out of the mix,” Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president and general manager of advertising at Roku, warned at VideoNuze’s 2017 Online Video Advertising Summit here.

Related: Set-Top VOD Ad Views Surging

Set-top VOD can suffer from delays in reporting and from other shortcomings that aren’t present in the OTT advertising realm, he said.

Set-top-box VOD tends to focus on C3 and C7 ratings, but from days eight and beyond, “it’s feeling fragmented,” Maureen Bosetti, chief partnerships officer at media planning and buying company Initiative, said. “There’s an opportunity to get the measurement right.”

It’s also important to get the right creative for dynamically inserted ads, Pooja Midha, senior vice president of digital ad sales and operations at Disney/ABC Television Group, added. “It’s a different pitch process,” she said, noting that such inventory tends to get lumped in with traditional TV.

Although set-top VOD faces challenges ahead, it’s still a significant growth business. Canoe, the MSO-backed advanced ad joint venture, reported in April that VOD ad impressions reached 5 billion in the first quarter, a 21% jump. Canoe, now on track for more than 20 billion ad impressions for 2017, delivered a record 17.9 billion impressions in all of 2016.

However, in the digital advertising realm, there is an increasing pivot toward TV-connected devices. Last week, FreeWheel, the online ad-tech firm owned by Comcast, said Roku players and other TV-connected OTT devices toppled PCs/desktops to jump into the lead with respect to online ad view share in the first quarter of 2017.

Related: OTT Devices Gobbling Up Ad View Share: FreeWheel

“There’s incredible growth to be had there” when set-top VOD and OTT are combined, James Rooke, general manager, publisher platform at FreeWheel, said here as he presented those results.

“We’re very bullish on OTT,” Bosetti said. “The growth there is tremendous … but we need to plan for it appropriately.”

MOBILE MUST BE ‘AGNOSTIC’
A separate panel here focused on the evolution of advertising in another big growth area — mobile.

Mobile video advertising faces a significant challenge because it’s supporting a wide variety of short-form as well as premium, long-form TV content.

Mobile video must be approached as “agnostically as possible,” but the way the market is evolving also means one can’t put a 30- or 60-second spot in front of every piece of content heading to a smartphone, Mike Law, executive vice president and managing director of video investment at Dentsu Aegis Network U.S., pointed out. “I don’t know if we’ve completely solved for that.”

But what type of content is being viewed also matters. Shorter ads and smaller ad loads should be tied to shorter videos viewed on mobile devices, but not so with a show such as ABC’s Scandal, if it’s being viewed on a smartphone.

“That shouldn’t limit the [ad] supply,” Law said. “They’re still a viewer.”

For something like Scandal, those core metrics will be the same across multiple platforms, agreed Justin Fadgen, vice president of business development at Beachfront Media.

Spotify, the music streaming service that has expanded into video, is experimenting with ad models that use smaller loads in order to provide a better overall experience, Brian Danzis, head of global video monetization at Spotify, said.

Using TV-like ad loads on a mobile device can be “kind of annoying” to the viewer, he added.

Spotify has also created an ad matrix that delivers a certain ad format, depending on the device the consumer is using. “Fragmentation is a result of convergence,” Danzis said.

Roku’s move last week to offer linear TV-style audience guarantees to advertisers could prove to be a big moment in the evolution of over-the-top video.

“When it comes to measurement, it’s a bit of a watershed,” Tim Hanlon, founder and CEO of The Vertere Group, said. “It speaks to the pure volume of OTT video that is being distributed and consumed out there.”

Hanlon’s comments came in the wake of Roku’s announcement last week that it had introduced audience guarantees for TV advertisers based on Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings (DAR).

Roku, which claims to be the first OTT platform to offer such guarantees for certain audience demographics, held that the move closes the gap between over-the-top and traditional-TV ad measurement.

Hanlon said he agreed with that view, to a large extent, given Roku’s leading position in the world of online video. “They probably know and see more viewing behavior from consumers than anybody in the OTT space,” he said.

SCALING UP
Roku has managed to achieve some scale for its streaming platform. At last check, Roku had 13.4 million “active accounts” and a user base that streamed 9 billion hours of video for all of 2016.

Roku generated about $400 million in total revenue last year, with $100 million of that coming from its Media and Licensing segment — the company’s biggest profit center — which includes advertising sales.

Under Roku’s guaranteed plan, advertisers can target their buys to reach certain demos, rather than basing their buys on impressions. For example, a TV buyer could tap into Roku data on a guaranteed basis to target 18-to-49-year-old adults, Scott Rosenberg, Roku’s vice president of advertising, said.

The intro comes about two years after Roku and Nielsen forged a pact to measure demographics on the Roku platform. Roku struck a similar kind of deal with comScore last fall.

“We’re stepping it up significantly, using our data science to guarantee delivery to a target demo,” Rosenberg said. “This is the currency by which almost all TV advertising [dollars] are spent, and we’re effectively making that same currency available in OTT.”

Roku holds that its approach will help advertisers use TV-based metrics to reach consumers who’ve cut or shaved the cord, or who have shifted their viewing of TV services to Roku’s streaming platform. Ad-supported viewing is the platform’s fastest-growing content segment, according to Roku estimates, accounting for about half of the top 250 most-watched “channels.”

The digital nature of Roku’s platform, which is census-based rather than sample-based, offers a more accurate way to predict and optimize for audience demographic and eliminate waste, Rosenberg said.

Roku will offer those TV-style ad guarantees via the hundreds of channels comprising its Audience Network, including inventory for pure play OTT apps, TV Everywhere apps and even apps from MVPDs. That’s all rolled up into an aggregated audience, with Roku offering guarantees for demographic delivery.

Roku also offers more targeted advertising options that remain core to that part of its business.

FINDING COMMON CURRENCY
“The vast majority of TV advertising isn’t spent that way yet,” though, Rosenberg said. “We also want to be able to serve the teams that know they need to be investing in OTT audiences, but want that common currency.”

Roku’s latest ad move also comes as OTT and IP streaming start to replace how some consumers are watching TV and to pose a challenge to the legacy ecosystem, Hanlon said.

The discussion is now shifting to how programmers, advertisers and distributors can exploit and monetize this growing platform. That, Hanlon reasoned, will now shift to how digital and TV metrics can work together and get measured in a hybrid, more unified form.

“To me, it’s another step in equating or harmonizing TV viewership with streaming video, or OTT,” Hanlon said. “And, ironically, that’s the joke. They’re melding into becoming the same thing.”

Though Roku has taken an influential step in the area of TV-style measurement for advertising, Hanlon expects other streaming platforms to get involved in the discussion.