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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. |
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ImagineArt just gave fashion brands a way to skip the photoshoot entirely. Its new AI Fashion Studio turns a single virtual model into a full campaign - stills, video, and ads - without booking a photographer, a studio, or a human model. |
The same consistent model carries across an entire product line and future collections, no rebooking required. If a laptop can now produce what used to take a production budget, how much of fashion photography's cost was ever really about the clothes? |
Today in AI: |
ImagineArt's AI Fashion Studio skips the photoshoot GPT Image 2 blows past Nano Banana Pro Google makes its AI watermark optional |
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What's new? ImagineArt launched AI Fashion Studio, a tool that generates fashion photography and video using a consistent virtual model instead of booking a photographer, a studio, or a human model. |
What matters? |
The six-step workflow - pick or generate a model, dress it, add accessories, choose a background, direct the pose, then generate - mirrors an actual photo shoot without the logistics. The same virtual model carries over into ImagineArt's AI Ad Studio, turning one shoot into ready-to-run video ads sized for Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. Brands keep the identical model consistent across an entire product range and future collections, skipping the rebooking and recasting a new season usually requires. |
Why it matters? |
Fashion photography has been one of the last creative pipelines still gated by budget and scheduling. A tool that turns one AI model into a full campaign - stills, ads, and video - hands that leverage to anyone with a laptop instead of a production budget. |
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What's new? OpenAI's GPT Image 2 now sits atop the Artificial Analysis Image Arena with an Elo of 1,372 - a 73-point lead over Google's Nano Banana Pro and the largest first-to-second gap the leaderboard has recorded. |
What matters? |
GPT Image 2 swept the arena by 242 Elo points when it launched in April, and the lead has only widened since. It ranks well ahead of Midjourney v6 and the open-weight FLUX.2 [dev], which costs a fraction of GPT Image 2's $211 per 1,000 images. Text rendering is its standout skill, hitting 99% accuracy on legible in-image text - long the tell that gave away AI-generated images. |
Why it matters? |
A 73-point Elo gap is a rout by leaderboard standards, and it means most "best AI image generator" comparisons are now really about second place. For anyone picking a default tool for client work, that gap is hard to ignore. |
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SPONSORED BY TABS |
Two Minutes to Know What Slow Billing Is Costing You |
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Most SaaS finance teams know their billing process is slow.Most SaaS finance teams know their billing process is slow. Few know what it's costing them. |
The Tabs Billing Lag Calculator puts a dollar figure on it in two minutes - benchmarked against top SaaS companies. |
See your number. |
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What's new? Google will let Gemini users hide the small spark icon that marks images, videos, and songs as AI-made, rolling out a new toggle across the Gemini app and its Flow video editor. |
What matters? |
The toggle covers the Nano Banana, Omni, and Lyria models, meaning it applies across images, video, and music generated in Gemini. Turning off the visible mark doesn't touch SynthID, the invisible signal Google embeds in every file, which the company says has now tagged more than 10 billion pieces of content. Google also open-sourced Credentio, a library that lets developers build the same content-credential checks into their own apps. |
Why it matters? |
Creators have complained for months that a stamped-on watermark makes AI work look cheap, even when it's just one layer of a larger project. Making the visible mark optional - while keeping the invisible one - lets Google have it both ways: creative freedom up front, provenance underneath. |
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Everything else in AI |
fal.ai breaks down how to prompt GPT Image 2 for readable text, product shots, and consistent characters instead of vague "cinematic, 8K" tags. |
MiniMax open-sourced H3, a 33-billion-parameter video model that now ranks #1 in video editing on Artificial Analysis and generates native 2K clips with stereo audio for $0.13 a second. |
Google will shut down its Imagen 4 API models on August 17, pushing any app still calling imagen-4.0-generate-001 to migrate to the newer Nano Banana models. |
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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