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It's time to set up your holiday streaming campaign
Are you ready to reach holiday shoppers on CTV? For many streamers, the season is already underway.
Last year, according to Roku internal data, holiday content searches on Roku saw an 86% increase during October. And in November, those searches rise an average of 39% weekly. This surging holiday spirit is mirrored by consumer activity, as about half of Roku streamers shopped Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals in 2025.
Meeting those shoppers is easier than you might think. Begin with the seasonal outcome you hope to drive: awareness, online sales, leads, store visits, or another measurable goal. From there, define your audience, upload your creative, set the budget and campaign dates, and establish measurement before launching. You can even create a shoppable ad unit that lets streamers buy with a click of their remote.
Our holiday playbook offers a month-by-month guide to reaching shoppers during this all-important time of year.
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Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
A man who says he's not an archaeologist used 48 AI agents and free NASA laser scans to flag a possible Maya site that Mexico's archaeology institute has no record of. Today's lead covers how he went from an idea on vacation to a report in 72 hours, what the agents looked for, and what still has to happen before it counts as a find. As always, every story here is human picked and edited.
THE FRONT PAGE
A Vibe Coder Used 48 AI Agents to Find a Maya Site Mexico Never Recorded
TLDR: Pietro Miotti, who says he's not an archaeologist, used 48 AI agents to scan NASA lidar data and flagged a possible Maya site in Mexico that the country's archaeology institute, INAH, says isn't in its records.
The Story:
The idea hit Miotti while he was traveling in Peru. He asked Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok how an amateur could find ruins, and all four said lidar: laser scans fired from planes that can map the ground under a forest. His agents found a free NASA lidar dataset covering about 1,200 square kilometers of Mexican jungle and turned the scans into pictures. Then he went to bed.
Overnight, 48 agents went through the pictures one by one, looking for pyramids, platforms and plazas while skipping natural hills, sinkholes and roads. No special archaeology software was involved; the agents looked at the images and followed a written guide. The top hit was a cliff-edge hilltop with a leveled plaza, an oval mound he estimates at 8 to 12 meters tall, a raised courtyard and three nearby platforms. He sent a report to INAH, which wrote back that it had no registered site at that spot.
Its Significance:
Lidar has already shown that the Maya built far more than old maps showed, and a lot of lidar data sits online after being collected for forestry and other jobs nobody has checked for ruins. What's new is who can search it: one person with off-the-shelf AI agents went from a vacation idea to a report in about 72 hours. Keep the limits in mind. Miotti calls the find "not official yet" and his read of it speculation, and only a ground check, which needs INAH's permission, can show people built it. He has offered to help with that check and says he'll post an update if a team goes.
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Learn AI With Us
Most people try AI once, get a so-so answer, and quit. Our 14-day challenge gets you past that point, one short lesson a day.
Week one, AI starts working for you. It drafts a real email for you, flags which messages in your inbox need a reply, and turns messy notes into next steps. You also learn to catch its mistakes. By day 7 you have a weekly AI routine you'll want to keep.
Week two, you build something of your own. You find a skill people will pay for and turn it into an offer, with a one-page pitch, a short video and your first client emails, all drafted with AI and ready to test. Day 14 hands you a 30-day plan.
10 to 15 minutes a day. No tech background needed. We just released one for older adults, with a gentler progression in the lessons.
QUICK TAKES
The story: At its MAX conference Tuesday, Adobe added relighting to Photoshop, object removal and new color grading to Premiere, and a blink and blemish fix to Lightroom. Its Firefly AI Assistant, still in beta, takes plain-English requests, and a new Plan Mode lets you approve its plan before it runs.
Your takeaway: One-tap Quick Actions like Remove Object and Thumbnail Generator are out now, while the bigger agent features are still beta or preview. Adobe is also releasing a connector so ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can use Photoshop and Premiere features, though it says it's still "figuring out where and when and how to draw the line."
The story: An updated SEC filing puts 825 million shares on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with trading expected Nov. 19, per CNBC. That values Anthropic at about $916 billion to $1.02 trillion, well below the roughly $2 trillion an earlier filing pointed to in September, on revenue of $33.2 billion for the first nine months of 2026.
Your takeaway: CNBC says about 20% of shares are aimed at everyday investors, far more than usual, so it may show up in your brokerage app. Read the fine print first: the seven co-founders keep 50.1% of the votes, and the filing shows a $104 billion net loss, mostly a one-time accounting charge. This isn't investment advice, just what's in the filing.
The story: OpenAI opened a beta Business Hub on Tuesday where companies can claim a profile, fix their details, upload product lists and see how often ChatGPT mentions them. U.S. online stores and service businesses can also build a Business Agent that answers shoppers' questions in a labeled chat inside ChatGPT.
Your takeaway: Think of it as a Google business listing for the 1.2 billion people OpenAI says use ChatGPT each week. If you run a small shop, claim yours, but test any agent hard before customers do: in the test behind our guide to AI for writing emails, all five assistants promised an angry customer a refund the business never approved.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🎬 OpenShot Free and Open Source: Edits video on Windows, Mac and Linux with keyframes and green screen, a free option beside today's Premiere news.
🔏 Mailvelope Free and Open Source: Adds end-to-end encryption to Gmail and Outlook on the web, so only your recipient can read it.
📋 Worklenz Free and Open Source: An open-source Asana alternative, free for up to five people and three active projects.
📓 Gemini Notebook Free: Google's renamed NotebookLM answers questions from your own files, up to 50 sources per notebook.
🎨 OpenArt Paid: Makes AI images, video and audio in one studio with 100+ models, with plans from $13 a month.
🎙️ BetterDictation Paid: Types what you say into any Mac app, even offline, for a one-time $39 instead of a subscription.
TRENDING
Reddit Turned Its Threads Into AI Reviews for 10,000 Products. Reddit Reviews uses AI to sum up what users say about roughly 10,000 products into one page of likes, dislikes and a positive, mixed or negative split, for U.S. users on iPhone, Android and the web. Reddit says brands can't pay to be featured; the bigger risk is fake praise, so open two or three original threads before you buy.
Claude Can Now Open Asana, Canva and Other Apps Right Inside the Chat. Anthropic says the feature is rolling out on all plans on the web and desktop app, starting with tools like Asana, Canva, Dropbox, monday.com and Webflow. You open the app beside your chat, ask Claude for a change, and approve its actions like any other connector.
Google's Pixel Phones Can Now Build You a Widget From One Sentence. Gemini's new Create My Widget turns a description like "a trip dashboard" into a home screen widget, pulling from Gmail and Calendar, rolling out over the next few weeks in select countries for adults. Pixel 10 owners also get Rambler, which turns rambling speech into tidy text as you talk.
Google Opens Gemini 4 Carbon to Developers and Ultra Subscribers. Google's strongest model, first handed only to security teams, is now in the paid Gemini API at $2 per million input tokens through Nov. 30, then $4. Google AI Ultra subscribers get it in the Gemini app; Google doesn't say anything about free users.
New York Opens Sign-Ups for Its AI Safety Law, With Fines Up to $3 Million. Under the RAISE Act, AI companies with more than $500 million in yearly revenue, like OpenAI and Anthropic, must register by Jan. 1, publish safety plans and report serious incidents within 72 hours. Fines run up to $1 million for a first violation and $3 million after that.
OpenAI Buys Odessia, a Young AI Travel Agent. Founder Francis Davidson, who started the apartment-rental company Sonder, says he now works on OpenAI's future in travel, and the app has already shut down. OpenAI hasn't confirmed the deal or said what it will build, but trip planning is one of the main jobs people hand to AI assistants.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🔎 Owners Say: Type in a product and see what real owners say after living with it
Build a single-file HTML app called Owners Say in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No API key needed.
I type a product (like a specific espresso machine) and pick what matters most to me: reliability, easy for a beginner, worth the price, size and noise, or lifespan.
The app calls the Anthropic Messages API with the web_search tool to read owner reviews, forum threads and long-term reviews. It must never invent quotes, numbers or sources, and says plainly when it can't find enough owner discussion.
Show a two-sentence verdict, an estimated positive, mixed and negative bar, what owners like and dislike, an answer about my priority, any warning signs of fake or paid reviews (like a burst of five-star reviews in one week), and real source links.
Style: near-black background, coral and teal accents, Space Grotesk, Newsreader and JetBrains Mono fonts.What this does: Type in something you're thinking of buying, like the espresso machine in today's Reddit story. The app searches owner reviews and forum threads, then shows a quick verdict, what people like and dislike, an answer about the thing you care about most, and any signs the praise might be fake, with links to every source.
Stop Making Shoppers Spell It Out
“Running shos” shouldn’t return zero results. Neither should “red waterprof trail runners under $150.”
Traditional search needs exact keywords. Gladly understands what shoppers mean, typos and all, and turns dead-end searches into products that fit what they asked for.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today's news)
✅ AI Can Now: Look through 1,200 square kilometers of laser scans overnight and flag a possible ruin that isn't in Mexico's records.
❌ Still Can't: Confirm it. Only a permitted ground check by archaeologists can show the mounds were built by people.
✅ AI Can Now: Turn one sentence into a working phone widget that pulls from your email and calendar.
❌ Still Can't: Do it for everyone yet. Google's widget maker is limited to select countries and adult users, and it's rolling out over weeks.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Surowiecki's 2004 book argues that a big, varied group of people often judges better than any single expert, as long as each person thinks for themselves. He's just as clear about when crowds go wrong: when everyone copies everyone else. That's the question inside today's Reddit story, since an AI summary of Reddit is only as good as the crowd it's summing up.
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Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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