Roku just announced a new advertising product called Roku Curate that combines the company's streaming data with purchase data from major retailers — and the result is TV ads that work more like the creepy ads that follow you around the web.
The launch partners include Kroger, Instacart, Best Buy, Fetch, Criteo, and Fandango. That means a Kroger loyalty cardholder who streams on Roku could start seeing ads based on their grocery purchases. An Instacart shopper might see ads tied to items they've ordered. Best Buy's data could flag someone shopping for electronics and serve them a relevant TV ad before they pull the trigger.
This month, Roku announced it surpassed 100 million streaming households, so the reach here is substantial.
Your TV has been getting smarter about ads for years — but until recently, most streaming ads were still bought the old-fashioned way, targeted by show genre or broad demographics rather than actual purchase behavior. Roku Curate changes that. It packages Roku's viewership data together with retailers' purchase histories and sells the combination to advertisers as a ready-to-use bundle, with built-in measurement to show whether the ad actually led to a sale.
Roku isn't alone in this. Walmart bought smart TV maker Vizio in 2024 specifically to pull off the same trick — using Walmart's shopper data to target ads on Vizio screens and track whether viewers then bought something at Walmart. Customers who see those CTV ads are 28% more likely to buy from Walmart, Ryan Mayward, senior vice president of sales at Walmart Connect, told Marketing Drive. Amazon has been doing a version of this for years, and its retail media business is projected to hit nearly $70 billion in 2026, according to WARC Media, an analyst firm specializing in media. NBCUniversal and Albertsons launched a similar tie-up in late 2025, letting advertisers target Peacock streaming ads using Albertsons' grocery purchase data and track whether those ads drove in-store sales across the chain's 2,200+ locations. Roku's version puts the company directly in that same race.
For advertisers, Roku Curate promises less paperwork — instead of separately negotiating data deals with Kroger and Roku and figuring out how to stitch the audiences together, they buy it as one package. For Roku, it's a way to make its ad business more competitive with Amazon and Walmart, which have the advantage of owning both the retailer and the streaming platform.
For you at home, the practical effect is straightforward: the ads on your streaming TV are going to get a lot more personal.
Read next: Which Roku should you buy? All the Roku streaming players compared
[Image credit: Suzanne Kantra/Techlicious]
