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Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads |
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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. |
Learn more |
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Good morning, AI enthusiast. |
Black Forest Labs just gave AI video its voice. FLUX 3 Video generates clips up to 20 seconds long with dialogue, sound effects, and lip-syncing baked directly into the same generation pass - no separate audio pass required. |
That single-model approach to image, video, and audio is starting to look like the new baseline for creative AI tools, not a novelty feature. The real question: is "good enough" synced audio enough to make AI video usable in actual productions, or will creators still reach for dedicated sound tools? |
Today in AI: |
FLUX 3 Video ships with built-in dialogue and sound ChatGPT's Computer History remembers your workday automatically xAI's free Imagine Image 2.0 edits with pixel precision |
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What's new? Black Forest Labs made FLUX 3 Video publicly available on August 4, a multimodal model that generates clips up to 20 seconds long with dialogue, sound effects, and lip-syncing built directly into the same generation pass as the video. |
What matters? |
Native audio ships with every clip instead of needing a separate sound pass, including synced dialogue across 12+ languages. Developers and artists can already try the model through hosted partners, with multiple scenes, camera angles, and a draft mode for fast iteration before a final render. In Black Forest Labs' own evaluations, FLUX 3 posted a text-to-video ELO of 1135, tying Sora's Seedance 2.0 and beating Runway and Luma in head-to-head comparisons. |
Why it matters? |
Video with usable, synced sound baked in closes one of the last gaps between AI-generated clips and something a working creator could actually publish. If FLUX 3 holds up outside Black Forest Labs' own benchmarks, silent AI video demos may already be behind us. |
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GUIDE |
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What's new? OpenAI launched Computer History, an opt-in ChatGPT Mac feature that logs your clicks, typing, and app switches in the background, then turns that activity into searchable memories ChatGPT and Codex can reference later. |
What matters? |
No screenshots involved. The feature captures interaction events, not screen recordings or system audio, and deletes the raw event stream after 48 hours. It can spot patterns in repeated work and propose automations for tasks you do the same way every day, instead of just answering one-off questions. Early hands-on testing from MacStories found the timeline genuinely useful for picking up work where you left off, though the always-on tracking may give some users pause. |
Why it matters? |
Memory that spans an entire workday, not just a chat thread, pushes ChatGPT closer to a real work assistant instead of a search box. It also raises the bar every other assistant now has to clear on both usefulness and trust. |
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What's new? xAI rolled out Imagine Image 2.0, a free upgrade to Grok's image tool that adds region-level editing, background removal, and support for up to five reference images in a single generation. |
What matters? |
A magic wand tool edits only the exact region a user points at, while a separate segmentation tool selects precise areas to modify without redoing the whole image. The model places second globally on both major image arenas - 1,439 Elo in editing and 1,320 in text-to-image, trailing only OpenAI's gpt-image-2. It's already live as Quality Mode on grok.com/imagine and in xAI's iOS and Android apps, free to use, with API access still coming. |
Why it matters? |
Precision tools like a magic wand and multi-image compositing used to mean opening Photoshop. Folding them into a free, prompt-based tool puts professional-grade image editing in reach of anyone who can describe what they want changed. |
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Everything else in AI |
Lightricks released LTX-2.5, an open-weights video model that generates synced audio and holds consistent characters and lighting across multishot scene cuts - playable instantly through fal.ai's hosted demo. |
Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash at half its usual price through year-end, with coding accuracy jumping from 34% to 44% on its toughest benchmark. |
Anthropic began embedding invisible watermarks in everything Claude writes worldwide, complying with new EU transparency rules that took effect this month. |
Microsoft merged its consumer and business Copilot apps into one platform, cutting Group Chats, Podcasts, and the Mico mascot ahead of a "super app" launch this fall. |
Want more out of your AI stack? Grab the Complete AI Bundle - prompts, workflows, and guides built for people who actually ship with AI. |
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