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Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
TODAY IN AI
Watch Tavus’ most realistic AI human model yet. Source: Tavus.
Tavus released Phoenix 4.5, a rendering model for AI video avatars that adds upper-body micro-movements and small expression shifts so the avatar looks like it is actually listening. The company says it is the fastest human-rendering model on the market, producing video at 134 milliseconds. If you use avatar tools for training or support videos, this is the kind of upgrade that makes the uncanny valley a little shallower.
OpenAI added a data plugin to ChatGPT Work that connects company data sources directly to a chat, so you can ask what changed in a metric instead of building a dashboard first. OpenAI published starter prompts alongside it and separately introduced ChatGPT for Financial Services, a version of ChatGPT Work with premium data feeds and industry templates built in.
Anthropic published its latest Threat Intelligence report on how people have tried to misuse Claude, from surveillance operations to weapons research. Two trends stand out: AI's role in cyberattacks is becoming more autonomous, and sophisticated attacks no longer need sophisticated attackers. Useful reading if you are responsible for security policy at work, even a small team.
Meta launched Muse, its first personal AI agent. It connects to your email, calendar, shopping, and payment accounts and runs tasks in the background on its own machine, such as booking tickets or clearing an inbox. Adoption has been fast, but TechCrunch reported that plenty of users are asking whether they trust Meta with that much account access.
TUTORIAL
How to automate your Monday morning work brief with ChatGPT Work
ChatGPT Work can now run scheduled tasks against your connected apps, which means your weekly catch-up can be waiting for you before you sit down.
Open ChatGPT and toggle on Work.
Go to Plugins and connect the sources you want it to read, such as Gmail or Slack.
Start a new Work chat and describe exactly what should appear in your Monday brief.
Paste in the sample prompt below, filling in your time and your tools.
“Every Monday at [add time], create my weekly work brief. Review relevant activity from the previous week in [Gmail/Slack/Teams]. Summarize important decisions, unfinished tasks, requests that need a response, blockers, and anything I should follow up on. Organize the brief into: Top Priorities, Follow-Ups, Decisions, Blockers, and Recommended Next Actions. Schedule the task for every Monday at [your preferred time].”
Review the instructions and schedule ChatGPT proposes, then confirm the task.
Turn on email or push notifications under Settings > Notifications so the finished brief reaches you each Monday.
You can also open the prompt directly in ChatGPT and edit it from there.
Scheduled tasks and plugins are ChatGPT Work features, so this will not run on a standard personal plan, and the brief is only as complete as the sources you connect.
TOOLS WORTH TRYING
Guru: An AI source of truth that delivers cited, trusted answers across every workflow, automatically.
AdKit: Research competitors, launch campaigns, and track performance with AI.
Skydive: A cloud platform for AI agents that automate real business tasks.
Sparkvid: Make videos, direct the motion, and edit them with AI.
4 tools catching our attention this week.
Figr: Sponsored: generates high-fidelity product screens that follow your existing design system and flows, so mockups already look like your product. It is built for teams with an established design system; if you are starting from a blank page, there is less for it to learn from.
Typecast: an AI voice generator with realistic voices and avatars, available through an API for developers. Voice quality is strong, but the API route assumes you have someone to integrate it rather than a ready-made app.
NxCode: builds production-ready apps from plain-language descriptions, no coding required. As with every no-code builder, the first version is easy and the tenth revision is where you find out how much control you really have.
ChatGPT Work data plugin: the new OpenAI plugin from today's headlines, letting you query connected company data in chat. It only helps if your data is already in a source it can connect to, and it needs a Work subscription.