Alison Levin, Roku’s VP of global ad revenue and marketing solutions, said the company gained a record number of clients in the third quarter.
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In late spring 2020, Alison Levin was outside in her backyard with her young daughter and golden retriever. Both were running as quickly as they could — at one another, for the same ball. Inevitably, they collided.
“She went down, and we held our breaths,” she said. “And then she popped right up and just kept running.”
Levin, Roku’s VP of global ad revenue and marketing solutions, saw this as a metaphor of sorts. Roku, where she’s helmed the ad sales business since 2015, saw massive cancellations in March at the beginning of the pandemic. Roku let businesses out of deals as advertisers pulled or paused budgets across the board.
At first, it wasn’t pretty. Roku stock had been trading at $127.50 on February 3, before pandemic volatility sent stocks diving. It cratered, shedding more than half its value to hit a low of $63.84 on March 16.
“We got hard at work doing what it was that we were there to do. Focusing on the things that were unique to us: Flexibility, precision, real-time analytics, all those things matter,” Levin said. “Plus, the background of streaming was booming and linear was collapsing. We just kept hitting hard. We immediately released all of this data to the market about what’s happening on linear, what’s happening on streaming…”
Things started to bounce back. Then the company saw an inflection point for advertisers shifting budgets from traditional linear into streaming, where they could turn campaigns on and off quickly, and where they could swap out campaigns depending on what was open and what was allowed in that particular state or region.
For the streaming world, and for Roku in particular, it was a big moment.
“When things opened up in the third quarter … we knew that the dam that would break and the tipping point would happen,” Levin said. “I think we all were really pleasantly surprised that marketers leaned into this moment, and it happened in Q3.”
Since then, the stock is up to $342.97 as of the close of trading on Friday, an increase of 437% from its low last March. Its market cap is over $45 billion.
Making the pie
Levin, a New Jersey native, had been working at video ad network YuMe as an ad seller before Roku recruited her. She was trying to talk about — and actually sell — the proposition of connected TV to the industry before it was really a known subject.
“At that point, it was nascent. A lot of buyers had no idea what it was,” she said. “This was before Tubi, Pluto, any of those channels even existed — before a lot of people even knew what Roku was. I knew that I had wanted to focus on connected TV because I saw that’s where it was going.”
Roku had reached out to her in 2014, when it didn’t even have an ad sales team. She said she met with Scott Rosenberg, today the SVP and GM of its platform business, as the company was starting to integrate into smart TVs as an operating system, and was about to launch a partnership with Nielsen for audience guarantees. “My head, like, exploded,” she said.
“At that point, I just knew that if they were able to set up a team that could execute the products, [that] in and of itself would be something that the industry has never seen before and the industry needed. So I was sold right at that point.”
The sales team was briefly just Levin. They brought on Jared Lefkowitz, now the senior direction of ad revenue strategy, then started staffing up.
“People weren’t thinking about connected TV yet,” Levin said. “We had to create the industry early on, because we weren’t taking a slice of the pie, we were building, or baking, the pie.”
