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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.
GM to the Top 1% ☕
A VP of Operations told me something on a discovery call that I have not stopped thinking about.
"I ran your product through three AI tools before this call. Two of them said you integrate with our ERP natively. Your website says something close to that. I need you to tell me if it is true, and I need you to know I will check."
She was not hostile. She was doing exactly what a good buyer does now. She was using me as the fact-checker and auditing the fact-checker at the same time.
💡 YOU ARE THE VALIDATOR ON PROBATION
Gartner surveyed 645 B2B buyers and found 69% prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep. That is the headline vendors love. The rep is still essential.
Now read the line underneath it. Asked who is more likely to give them misleading information, 51% of buyers said generative AI and 49% said a sales rep. The machine beats us on trust by two points. Two.
So the role buyers are offering is real, and it comes with a catch. They want a human to confirm what the AI told them, and nearly half of them walk in assuming the human will spin it.
That changes what good selling looks like. Persuasion is the wrong muscle for a validator. The rep who wins this moment is the one who says "the AI is wrong about that, here is the documentation" and also says "the AI is right about our weakness there, here is how customers handle it."
One honest concession buys more credibility than ten confident claims. Buyers are counting.
🔧 THE VALIDATOR PLAYBOOK
Four moves to become the source a skeptical buyer trusts more than the chatbot.
1. Ask what the AI told them: Early in discovery, ask directly: "What did your research or AI tools say about us?" You cannot validate claims you never hear, and buyers almost never volunteer them.
2. Sort into three piles: True, false, and partially true. Respond to each out loud. The partially true pile is where most deals are lost, because nobody addresses it.
3. Concede one real weakness first: Before you correct anything, confirm one accurate criticism and explain how customers work around it. It proves you are not running a script, and it makes every correction after it land harder.
4. Leave proof, not adjectives: Every claim you make in the call gets a link, a doc, or a customer name in the follow-up. Assume she will check, because she will.
🎯 THIS WEEK'S HOMEWORK
Pick one active deal and paste your product's name plus the buyer's industry into two different AI tools. Ask each what the strengths and weaknesses of your product are for that buyer. Write down every claim, sort it into the three piles, and prepare your answer to the partially true ones before your next call.
❓ QUESTION OF THE DAY
What is one thing the AI says about your product that is partly true and that you have never addressed out loud?
Reply with it. Naming it is the first step to owning it.
See you tomorrow.
Edward
Founder, Morning Sales
P.S. Running the AI audit on your own product is faster with the right prompts. The 500 AI Sales Prompts manual includes the buyer-perspective research prompts and the objection-sorting prompts I use to hear what the market's AI says about me before the buyer repeats it on a call. 27 dollars, yours in two minutes: https://store.edwardgorbis.com