Want to order dinner before watching that next episode of your favorite streaming series? Pick up your Roku remote, click on that special offer, and you’ll have piping hot food sitting in front of you before Ellie surprises or infuriates Joel once again.
That’s the hope anyway for the streaming company and Doordash, who together just announced a new multiyear partnership that makes Doordash a key promotion partner on the Roku platform.
Here are the specifics of the deal:
Complimentary Dashpass: New and existing Roku account holders with a linked streaming or smart home device can get six months of complimentary DashPass.
For those unfamiliar with Dashpass, the delivery company’s subscription plan allows customers to order food without being charged a delivery fee (which ranges from about $2-$5 nowadays). The Dashpass offer is a big win for Doordash since Roku has a massive subscriber base (65 million accounts as of November 2022), and converting just a percentage point or two of the streamer’s subscribers into paying Dashpash subscribers will be a big boost for the delivery company.
Shoppable Ad Offers: DoorDash will be the exclusive marketplace ad solution partner for DoorDash US restaurants and grocers that buy interactive shoppable ads on Roku for the first year of the partnership.
Today Roku gets the bulk of its revenue through advertising (and less every year from streaming hardware), which is why Roku customers (like myself) are seeing more ads pop up on the streaming device nowadays as they navigate their way to shows.
And now, the chances of those ads featuring a special offer for a restaurant down the street have gone up. DoorDash merchant partners can run ads directly on Roku, and if a customer decides to bite, they’ll get the TV ad promotion offer via SMS/email. From there, the customer is led to the storefront directly in the DoorDash app to redeem the offer.
Food delivery promotion via streaming isn’t anything new – Just Eat launched an Apple TV app in 2016 – but it’s getting easier to do as platform players like Roku bake partners like Doordash more tightly into the platform. But even after the attempt to make it easier to order food on our TVs has been going on for almost a decade, the integrations are still mostly about retrieving special offers.
I’d really like to see Roku or other platforms make it possible to see content from local restaurants and food makers I’m interested in. For example, imagine learning more about how the buzzy new pizza place in your town makes pizza or hearing from the chef about the latest item on the menu.
While It might not be smell-o-vision, it would still be pretty darn cool.
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