How Roku’s comms team is shaping the platform’s story for 100M households
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How Roku’s communications team is shaping the platform’s story for 100M households
Roku just hit 100 million streaming households, and for Kelli Raftery, the company’s vice president of global communications, the milestone isn’t a moment to exhale, but a signal to keep pushing the brand forward.
Raftery joined Roku in 2021 after years at CBS, where she cut her teeth across sports, entertainment, news, and corporate communications. She now leads a global comms team spanning everything from consumer product and advertising to subscriptions, international markets, and content, including originals and more. The job for her team, as she frames it, is as much about protection as it is promotion.
“At a high level, our role is to promote and protect the company,” she says. “We connect the dots to ensure every audience hears one clear, consistent narrative about who Roku is and where we’re headed.” To her, that’s rooted in what the company does best: “It simplifies.”
That simplicity also shows up in how Roku approaches content. Raftery describes Roku as “the front door to television,” and the strategy is to pair the hits people want to watch with the habits they already have. That’s why Roku Originals and The Roku Channel have become such powerful engines—they sit on top of the biggest TV streaming platform in the U.S. and turn that scale into a curated, easy‑to‑navigate experience. Whether it’s buzzy originals like the Laguna Beach reunion or new offerings like Howdy, Roku’s $3/month ad‑free tier, the goal is the same: Deepen engagement by making great TV easier to find.
One of the cleaner throughlines in Roku’s current comms push is sports—not only as a content vertical, but also as a proof point for the platform’s broader push to streamline the user experience.
“Sports are a perfect example of where Roku shines: taking something complicated and making it easier for viewers,” Raftery says. “In a fragmented streaming world where fans are juggling multiple apps, our role matters more than ever.”
Roku’s pitch is the platform’s role in aggregating sports across services, surfacing games quickly and partnering with leagues and teams to reduce friction for streamers, at a moment when the landscape is more fragmented than ever. The deeper comms play is that sports fans, once they’re on the platform, tend to stay. “When fans come to Roku for sports, they stay for everything else—entertainment, news, and more. That’s a compelling message, and it reinforces the strength and value of the platform.”
The sports background she brings to the role isn’t incidental. Raftery grew up in a sports household with a dad who was a college coach and emphasized the importance of team. She also played tennis, basketball, and lacrosse, and says that upbringing shapes how she leads. “You learn early how to communicate, adjust, stay resilient, and take care of your team. You won’t win every game, but you always show up.” The CBS years reinforced that instinct for connective tissue. “I grew up at CBS, where every part of the business connected. It taught me to think holistically, not in silos.”
Like many communications teams right now, Roku’s is actively integrating AI into its workflow. Raftery’s framing is practical without being evangelical: AI handles research, trend-spotting, and the organizational heavy lifting, but doesn’t replace human instinct and strategic decision making. “It doesn’t replace reporter relationships, good judgment, crisis instincts, or the ability to read a room and know when to pivot,” she says. “AI supports the work, and our people shape the narrative and make the calls.”
The team’s LLM strategy is also evolving, including working to crack the code on how to best navigate the growing influence of generative engine optimization. “We’re ramping up content on our owned channels to make sure we’re showing up in LLM search and meeting people where they’re increasingly starting their discovery.”
To promote their businesses across Roku, Raftery and the team are thinking across newsletters, podcasts, and creators, not as ancillary channels, but as a key part of their strategy. “There are so many new ways to reach people, and these ‘new’ voices matter. People trust them, they move fast, and they often shape the conversation.”
Roku’s Originals strategy follows a similar path: build around existing cultural energy rather than manufacturing it from scratch. The recent Laguna Beach reunion special is a case study she points to. And the recently launched Howdy, a $3/month ad-free tier, is an extension of that same philosophy to meet people where they are.
When asked how she defines success for a comms operation, Raftery keeps it simple: “If our story is landing and the business feels supported, that’s a win.” But that doesn’t mean Roku isn’t underpinning its comms victories without backing them up. That means quantifying “sentiment, message pull-through, share of voice and the strength of our relationships,” she says.
With milestones like the 100 million mark and content from every major streamer and Roku’s own subscription services, plus FAST channels, premier sports, The Roku Channel, and more, Raftery and her team have plenty of material to tell the Roku story. “Being #1 means we can’t get comfortable,” she says. “We have to work even harder to stay there.”
Ad Age EIC: Substack expansion less about scale, and more about voice, intimacy, and experimentation
Ad Age, the nearly 100-year-old leading advertising trade, made its debut on Substack last month.
The publisher is the latest of its kind to expand onto the platform, following similar moves from The New Yorker, The Economist, and others. The simple explanation is usually that publications need to shore up direct audience relationships and diversify distribution as AI search and fragmentation continue to disrupt the media industry. But for AdAge, the strategy is a bit different.
Editor-in-Chief Jeanine Poggi says the launch of its Substack was “less about scale” and more about voice, intimacy, experimentation, and showing up where its audience lives.
“It started with a question of where people are actually spending time and how they’re choosing to keep up,” Poggi told Talking Points. “We know people still want what Ad Age does best—reporting, context, understanding how the industry works. But they’re not always coming to it the same way they used to. They’re finding things through feeds, through people, through newsletters they’ve chosen to let in. Substack felt like a way to meet that shift without overthinking it.”
The format reflects that philosophy by keeping its publishing cadence light, sharp, and in some cases, quick enough “to skim between meetings or on your way to a client dinner.” That lineup consists of one essential story a week, a fast roundup, and some audio—enough structure to be consistent, but loose enough to experiment. “Right now we’re just seeing how it behaves, what people respond to, what they ignore, what feels worth continuing,” Poggi added.
But the more interesting part is what she’s trying to create between the stories. “This gives us a little more room—how we introduce things, what we choose to highlight, what we’re paying attention to in between the bigger stories,” she said. “It just feels more human, and I think that matters right now. People want context. They want a sense of how to think about what they’re seeing, not just the information itself.”
The Substack’s debut piece set the tone well: Poggi interviewing Mischief’s Oliver McAteer on why the agency built its own Substack, and what they’re learning from it. His take: agencies have to own their narrative now. With thousands competing for a finite amount of coverage, the goal is to be “known before you’re needed.” It’s the same logic driving Ad Age’s move. “At some point, a new generation of marketers, creators and operators will need what we do,” Poggi wrote in a personal note to Substack subscribers. “The question is whether we’ll be known to them by then… Not just a brand they’ve heard of, but one they already trust and return to.”
Looking further out, Poggi is paying close attention to how communities are forming as AI makes content easier and cheaper to produce at scale.
“There’s going to be a lot more of everything—more articles, more videos, more opinions,” she said. “What becomes more valuable is knowing where to go, who to trust, and what’s actually worth your time.” Poggi added that this is where community starts to matter more, and it’s being seen by audiences shifting toward smaller and more defined spaces like group chats and niche forums.
There’s a lesson there for communicators, too. In a world that’s only getting noisier, the stories that cut through won’t be the loudest, but the most intentional and meaningful to the audience they’re actually built for.
Inside newsrooms’ AI civil war—and what it means for communicators
AI adoption and investment continues to rise, with nearly 80% of businesses in 2024 using the technology—and that number is only growing. But at the same time, industry leaders, policymakers, and pundits are bracing for the potential of an “AI bubble” on the brink of bursting.
But the push and pull around the utility or futility of AI isn’t just a macroeconomic debate, it’s one happening inside newsrooms, too.
According to reporting from The Wrap, McClatchy Media—the publisher behind local newsrooms like the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee and Kansas City Star—is under fire by employees resisting adoption of its new “content scaling agent.” In short, it’s a Claude-powered AI editor that helps journalists turn one original report into a slew of alternative formats—from short-form video scripts to long-form investigations.
The tool’s rollout during a company meeting in March highlights the stark contrast between how leadership sees its application and how staffers do. Vice President of Local News Eric Nelson said journalists who embrace the tool “are going to win” by increasing their ability to produce more content, while those “who are defiant will fall behind.”
Journalists have also made their stance clear: unions across McClatchy newsrooms have filed lawsuits on the grounds that the publisher violated contracts by not providing advance notice for such a sweeping technological change.
Reporters are even withholding their bylines in an attempt to remove their names from AI-generated spin-offs. Leadership, on the other hand, argues they have “every right to use their work.”
The back and forth between AI-bullish leadership and AI-resistant reporters serves as a very real parallel to what many teams in comms and beyond are grappling with right now. Teams need to ask themselves where the line is between leveraging AI to increase output and profitability versus protecting journalists’ focus on ethical intent and creativity.
Amidst these changes, the “human premium” in PR has never been more relevant. Simply feeding the machine with quick-turn stories and AI pitches will only feed into many reporters’ anxieties. Now more than ever is the time to not take the magic of a personalized touch for granted.
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