Beginning Summer 2024, Turn It Blue Ads users can now add-on Hulu and/or Roku premium ad placements to your standard Connected TV (CTV) campaigns. This is an exciting opportunity to expand your campaign's reach to new inventory and reach voters across even more channels and platforms than previously available. 

This is a long, descriptive article, but here's the TLDR version:

  1. Hulu and Roku premium placements are now available as an ADD-ON to your standard CTV campaign.
  2. Each platform has a $7,500 minimum. This is in-addition to your standard CTV campaign budget.
  3. Hulu and Roku may have longer creative approval times, up to 3-business days. We will launch your standard CTV campaign immediately, then your Hulu and Roku ads go live ASAP upon approval.
  4. Reporting & Analytics for the full campaign—inclusive of both your standard CTV campaign and any Hulu or Roku add-ons—will be aggregated together in your Analytics Dashboard.
  5. If you are an agency and use margin management, please be aware that margins do not currently extend to Hulu and Roku add-on's. We hope to add this functionality down the road but for now you will have to account for your margins on these add-on services separately.

As a reminder: Our standard Connected TV campaigns offer industry-leading addressable targeting, and deliver to hand-curated deals across popular streaming platforms like Sling, Fubo, DirecTV Stream, Discovery+, Paramount+, Peacock and many others. 

Hulu and Roku premium placements are only available as an ADD-ON to your standard Connected TV campaign. They are not available as a standalone placement at this time.

The first step to accessing Hulu or Roku ads inventory is to create a standard CTV campaign in Turn It Blue Ads, which you can do by clicking "New Campaign" on your Turn It Blue Ads dashboard or from the lefthand navigation menu.

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Next, choose your campaign type (Connected TV & Streaming Services) and add in your flight dates and budget. If you are running election advertising, be sure the "Election Advertising" toggle is on.

The budget you enter on this screen will be your budget for ONLY the standard Connected TV component of your campaign. For example, if you are planning to spend $25,000 total with $15,000 on Standard Connected TV and $10,000 on Hulu, you will only enter the standard CTV budget ($15,000) on this screen.

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When you have your information entered on this screen, click "Next" to move to the next step.

To add-on Hulu or Roku ads, click the "Add Hulu/Roku CTV Placements" under the logo(s) in Step 2. Then, a box will appear to ask you to choose your Hulu or Roku budget. Remember, this amount is in addition to the budget you entered on the previous screen.

Because we are accessing premium, guaranteed inventory on your behalf, Hulu and Roku each have a $7,500 minimum ad spend.  For example, if you plan to use both platforms, you will need to have your initial Standard CTV budget of at least $500 plus another $15,000 for Hulu and Roku combined.

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If you'd like to add-on both Hulu and Roku ads, you can just click both options and enter in each budget before moving on to step 3.

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Once you have chosen your add-on placements and their respective budgets, you can click "Next" to move onto Step 3 and 4, which allows you to choose your geographic area and audience. 

Please note: Hulu and Roku do not accept CRM or Voter File audience matching. If your Standard CTV campaign is set to a CRM or Voter File audience, and you also select Hulu or Roku add-ons, we will default to your geo-targeting selection plus a "likely voter" screen for your Hulu and Roku buys. Reach out to our Client Success team at success@turnitbluedigtal.com if you would like to adjust this targeting.

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Step 5 in the campaign builder allows you to choose which ads will run on each ad inventory. You can choose to run the same ad, or different ads, to run on each Hulu, Roku, and Standard CTV ad campaigns, or you can run multiple ads across each inventory.

When you have uploaded all of your ads and attached them to your placements, you can click "Next" to move to step 6, where you will review the information for your campaign and confirm it is correct. This confirmation step is especially important for Hulu and Roku add-ons because these ads are slightly different than Standard CTV ads, specifically:

  1. Hulu and Roku may have longer approval times, up to 3-business days. We will launch your Standard CTV campaign immediately, then your Hulu and Roku ads go live ASAP upon approval.
  2. Hulu and Roku buys are non-cancelable and non-changeable after purchase. You may still edit your Standard CTV campaign, but there will be no option to edit Hulu and Roku ad campaigns. 
  3. Creative swaps on Hulu and Roku buys are strongly discouraged. Because of the way Hulu and Roku require your ads to be purchased, any changes require a new creative audit by the platform (which can take up to 3-business days), causing your ads to stop running over that period of time and potentially under-deliver over the full campaign.
Once everything looks correct and your payment information is entered, click "Pay and Launch Campaign" to send your campaign live! 🎉

Please remember, it may take up to 24 hours for all campaigns to run through a mandatory, industry-wide audit process, and Hulu or Roku ads may take a bit longer since they are subject to each platform's own auditing. Once live, we discourage editing of campaigns in the first five days, to allow for the platform's AI technology to effectively optimize and deliver in-full.