BFCM is now just weeks away. Most of you are about to put the vast majority of your marketing budget into Meta, Google and TikTok, but before you do that, I want you to read this email.

There's one massive channel you're not thinking about enough, and that's CTV.

Obviously, I'm not telling you to turn off paid social and paid search but I am telling you that there's a screen in your customer's house that most DTC brands aren't using, and it happens to offer 100X more viewing area than your iPhone 18 screen.

The time to run CTV is right now, and here are the numbers behind it that you need to know.

Last year, Roku users streamed 33.8 billion hours between October 1, 2025 and January 15, 2026. That's not a typo. We're talking about billions of total watch hours with a B.

It doesn't spread out evenly, either. December streaming hours were 17% higher than Roku's annual average, holiday searches on the platform jumped 78% during Christmas week, and Roku's biggest streaming weekend of the year was the Cyber 5, aka Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.

Roku is literally America's #1 TV streaming platform and reaches 100 million streaming households. So whoever your customer is, and whatever their age, income or zip code is, there's a very good chance they're on it and you can sell to them by running ads.

The reason to act now is that Q4 is both the biggest sales period of the year and the biggest streaming period of the entire year. The holidays are when people go back to watching TV together and you're going to regret not showing up here as a brand when people are most ready to watch and most ready to buy.

What actually changed? How about that you can now buy from the TV!

The thing that flipped CTV into a performance channel for me is Action Ads inside Roku Ads Manager.

This is basically how it works for a viewer seeing it. Your ad plays and a prompt shows up on the screen and then the viewer presses OK on their remote and depending on how you set it up, they can buy your product right there or get a text with a link to your site, sign up for your email list or set a reminder. It takes a few seconds to do and does exactly what it says. It lets the viewer take action, and it turns TV into a direct response channel on the biggest screen in their house.

And if you run your business on Shopify like most readers of this newsletter do, it's an even better experience. You install the Roku Ads app in Shopify, connect it to your Roku Ads Manager account, and sync your catalog (or just the products you want to push) and from there, you turn on Shopify Payments and checkout runs through Roku Pay. For eligible shoppers, their payment and shipping info is already filled in which makes conversion super simple and easy for them.

Imagine someone sees your gift set during a commercial break and owns it about three remote clicks later, without ever pulling out their phone. Then you see the sale in your Shopify dashboard like any other order and if you're not on Shopify Payments, you can still run Action Ads that text viewers a link to shop on their phone. This is just so much better than it used to be with TV where you can now drive direct purchases through the channel, not just reach.

The numbers you need to know

Roku compared Action Ads to their standard video ads, and the gap they found was really big. They said Action Ads drove a 47% lift in purchase intent and a 31% lift in brand awareness. They also said that Action Ads lead to a 3x lower cost per acquisition and 4.5x more goal actions per campaign so you are getting lower CAC and more actions per dollar if you run these Hush is not on their platform.

Roku also found a 96% correlation between how long someone dwells on the ad and whether they convert, and average dwell time is around 24 seconds. That means unlike paid social ads, viewers are actually stopping to pay attention, or pausing the commercial while they think about your offer and product.

They also told me that Roku viewers are 118 times more likely to press OK than to scan a QR code. So if you're still slapping a QR code in the corner of your TV spot and calling it "shoppable" it's time to let that go. You need to be using action ads in your campaigns.

What’s my holiday gameplan?

If you're reading this, you're probably thinking that you don't have much time left to get this live, and you're right. You need to be acting with a sense of urgency because the sales have already started, and everyone's competing for wallet share now. If you want to get started on with CTV, here’s what I’d do:

Now through Thanksgiving. Test fast and build your list.

We all know that the sales have already started, so you need to get working on this ASAP. Roku said that 39% of holiday shoppers start buying somewhere between October and Thanksgiving, which is about the same share as people who shop the classic Thanksgiving to mid-December window. Last year, holiday content searches on Roku jumped 86% over the month of October alone so by the time this email hits your inbox, a big chunk of your customers are already in holiday mode and already shopping.

That means you don't have the luxury of being slow on getting this going. You've got roughly three weeks until Thanksgiving, and your job is to figure out what works before Cyber 5 makes everything even more expensive.

I would start by picking one hero product or bundle. This is either your best-selling product, the best variety or intro bundle or the product that's easiest to gift to others. From there, you take a few of your top-performing creatives that are already running on Meta, and repurpose it for TV. Get these live within Roku Action Ads, run them side by side for the next week or two and let the data pick the winner.

I'd launch with Ok-to-Text or Ok-to-Remind first. If you've got a Cyber Monday deal locked in, Ok-to-Remind lets viewers tap to get pinged when it goes live, so you're basically building your BFCM list on the TV. Ok-to-Text is great for sending a gift guide or promo code to people who aren't ready to buy yet.

And definitely get your measurement in place before you spend money. Take a few minutes to install the Roku Pixel and Conversions API so you're tracking page views, sign-ups, add-to-carts and purchases from day one. If you wait until Cyber 5 to set this up, you'll be flying blind right when it matters most. By the week before Thanksgiving you should know which creative and which audience is working and that's what you scale for BFCM.

Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday. Make it stupid easy to buy.

This is when Ok-to-Checkout is your go to campaign. Take your winning creative from your first round of tests, put your strongest offer in it, and increase the budget.

The reason to do this is that holiday searches on Roku climb about 39% week over week through November. About half of Roku streamers shopped Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals last year and again, Roku's biggest streaming weekend of the entire year sits right in the middle of Cyber 5.

So if you're in beauty or personal care, a limited-edition gift set with Ok-to-Checkout is about as good as it gets. I’ve also seen pet brands use Roku's to run a stocking stuffer bundle targeted at known pet owners, which is super smart and easy to stand up. Food and beverage brands should lean into hosting kits and gift boxes for people planning holiday time with family and friends. If you sell higher-ticket stuff like furniture or mattresses, I wouldn’t force a TV checkout on a $1,500 purchase. Use Ok-to-Text to send the viewer a buying guide or exclusive code and let people buy on their phone or laptop.

December. Flush The Rest of the Funnel!

I think most people forget that Q4 is not just about Black Friday and Summer Monday. There's a massive amount of shopping activity in December too. 15% of Roku streamers didn't even start their holiday shopping until December.

Those people exist every year. They're the ones buying gifts on December 21st in a panic, and they're watching a lot of TV while they do it since December streaming runs 17% above Roku's average and holiday searches jump 78% during Christmas week.

So keep your campaign on, but change the message. Lead with shipping cutoff dates, because things like "order by the 18th, and it arrives by Christmas" is an amazing offer for DTC brands. If you have retail doors or local pickup, use Roku Ads Manager's location targeting to focus on the states, ZIP codes or market areas around your stores. There's no reason to pay to reach a household three states away from your nearest location!

Q5. The window everyone sleeps on:

I always call the time between December 15th and January 15th "Q5” because so many people are shopping right before the holidays, right after, and at the start of the new year. In fact, over 20% of Roku's holiday-season streaming happens between Christmas and January 15. That's almost as much as the entire Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve stretch and 56% of Roku holiday shoppers said they planned to keep shopping after the holidays.

Think about who's on the couch in that week between Christmas and New Year's. It’s people with gift cards burning a hole in their pocket and people returning stuff and buying what they actually wanted instead. You’ve also got a ton of people who are about to make a New Year’s resolution.

This is the perfect time to lean into that "new year, new you!" messaging or a “treat yourself” campaign to start the new year off the right way. Don't assume that DTC demand dies after Christmas. I've actually seen quite the opposite, and usually Christmas through January 15th is one of the busiest periods for most brands.

On Creative

The biggest rule is to only have one CTA per ad. You also want to have a voiceover that says "Press OK" out loud. Ads with a voiceover telling viewers to use their remote get a 20% higher response rate, so don't assume people will figure out the OK button on their own.

Design for across the room too, with big type, close up product shots and a benefit someone can understand in seconds from the couch. You also want to make the handoff from TV to your landing page seamless. If the ad says $49 gift set, the checkout or text link should say $49 gift set as well.

Who's already doing this

Two quick examples from Roku's case studies.

LolaVie, Jennifer Aniston's haircare brand, made Action Ads the centerpiece of a campaign and saw a 40% lift in sales and a 53% jump in new customers year over year. & fatty15, the DTC wellness brand, paired Roku Ads Manager with Shopify-enabled shoppable ads, and more than one in four add-to-carts turned into a purchase.

How to get started:

Roku Ads Manager is self-serve, and if you've ever built a campaign in Meta or Google, it'll feel familiar. You just pick your goal, build your audience using Roku's data, your own first-party data or custom audiences, set your locations, upload creative, set your budget and dates, and publish!

If you want to give them a try, you can sign up here.

Okay, that's all for this week. Thank you for reading and I'll see you back here soon!