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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.
First-time spenders get a $5,000 match on the first $5,000 spent with code BEEHIIV5K. Terms apply.
Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Amazon just made shopping with AI as simple as sending a text. Invited US shoppers can now text Alexa a list, a photo or a price question and get picks back, and nothing gets bought until they say yes. Today you'll see how it works, where to be careful, and why Airbnb and Meta are building helpers of their own. As always, every story here is human picked and edited.
THE FRONT PAGE
Amazon Now Lets You Text Alexa to Shop, After 400 Million Used Its Helper
TLDR: Amazon now lets invited US shoppers text Alexa to find products, track prices and place orders, and says millions more will get access in the coming weeks.
The Story:
On Friday, a small group of US Amazon customers got a text inviting them to turn on Alexa for Shopping by message. Once you accept the terms and link your number, you text it like a friend: dog food, a birthday gift and paper towels, all in one message. It searches, compares products, shows up to a year of price history, and only buys after you approve. You can also text a photo to find similar items, or ask it to tell you when something goes on sale.
Amazon says more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past year, and that use is up 8 times since January. Everyone else can join a waitlist at amazon.com/text-alexa-shopping. You'll need RCS chat turned on, which covers most Android phones and iPhones on iOS 18 or later.
Its Significance:
This is the AI shopping agent most people will meet first, and it lives inside the store selling the stuff. So check its picks against another store before a big purchase. Outside agents have barely caught on (DoorDash says they've placed only a few hundred orders in total), and Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from its site in September, so expect every big store to push its own. Invites arrive by text, which scammers love to copy: type the waitlist address yourself instead of tapping a link in a surprise message. And if you'd rather use an AI that doesn't keep a profile on you, our guide to Duck.ai shows how to chat with no account at all.
JOIN THE COMMUNITY
Learn AI With Us, Free
Most people try AI once, get a so-so answer, and quit. Our free 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 actually 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. There's even a cinematography course coming out soon.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Anthropic replayed real buy and sell orders from the space game's biggest market and gave Claude models 3 billion in-game credits to trade. Anthropic says its newest models made money in all nine two-week tests, with Fable 5 averaging 43%, while only one of about 20 rule-based bots broke even.
Your takeaway: It's a game, not Wall Street: Anthropic says the market is easier than a real exchange and its replay can't react to the bots' own trades. Still, six-month runs climbed from about 200% to 600% across models released four months apart, which shows how fast planning skills are improving.
The story: A new Muse feature called Spaces lets you describe something like a gift tracker, a trip planner or a school events board, and the app builds it. Meta says spaces can connect to your other apps and update on their own, and it's available now wherever Muse is.
Your takeaway: A holiday gift list is a good first try, since it's simple and low-stakes. Just remember that every app you connect gives Meta a closer look at your day.
The story: Airbnb told investors its agent launches in the first half of 2027 and will answer with maps, photos, calendars and comparisons instead of a plain chat window. CEO Brian Chesky says it will also handle changes, refunds and rebooking, things he says outside agents "can't easily" do.
Your takeaway: Same bet as Amazon: big apps want you using their own helper, not a general one. Airbnb has room to try, with third-quarter revenue up 19% to $4.87 billion.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🐫 CamelCamelCamel Free: Charts an Amazon item's price history and emails you when it drops, a second opinion before Alexa buys.
🗂️ SiYuan Free and Open Source: Keeps linked notes and pages on your own device, a local-first swap for Notion with most features free.
🎛️ VCV Rack Free and Open Source: Builds a virtual modular synthesizer on your computer, so you can learn synth patching without buying hardware.
🧹 Czkawka Free and Open Source: Finds duplicate files, look-alike photos and forgotten giant files hogging space, a free swap for paid cleaners.
📬 beehiiv Freemium: Starts an email newsletter free for up to 2,500 subscribers, on the same platform this newsletter uses.
⚙️ Make Freemium: Links your apps into automatic workflows without code, with 1,000 free credits a month to start.
🤖 Grok Freemium: xAI's assistant answers questions, makes images and searches X posts in real time, with a free tier.
TRENDING
OpenAI Reportedly Raises $11 Billion at a $1.25 Trillion Value. Bloomberg reports the round could reach about $20 billion, short of the $30 billion at $1.4 trillion OpenAI was reportedly after in September. Bloomberg also says possible IPO buyers now value Anthropic as low as $1.1 trillion, down from about $2 trillion a month ago.
Company AI Spending Barely Grew for Two Months, Ramp Data Shows. Spending on AI usage rose just 1.5% across August and September after a 42% jump in July, then picked back up 8.9% into late October. Ramp's economist blames price cuts and new company spending caps, not weaker demand.
Outside Testers Say Anthropic's AI Progress Has Roughly Doubled in Speed. Evaluator METR estimates Anthropic's models are improving about twice as fast as before, and says anything from 1.3 to 3 times wouldn't surprise it. METR also says Anthropic redacted most of the evidence it found most useful, so outsiders can't check much of it.
ElevenLabs Users Can Now Post AI Songs Straight to SoundCloud. ElevenLabs says people have made more than 25 million tracks with its music models. Not every platform is on board: Bandcamp bans AI-made music, and Deezer lets listeners filter it out.
Thinking Machines Releases Inkling 2 Small, With Open Weights Promised. The lab says its new model scored 86.3% on a hard version of the SWE-Bench Pro coding test. It plans to let anyone download the full model under a free license once outside safety testing wraps up.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🏷️ Real Deal Check: Type the price you're looking at and find out if it's a deal or a dressed-up regular price
Build a single-file HTML app called Real Deal Check in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No API key needed.
I type a product, the price I'm seeing, and the store. The app calls the Anthropic Messages API with the web_search tool to find the current price of that exact product at 2 to 4 major US stores, plus any recent low or typical price.
It must never invent prices, stores or links. If it can't confirm a price, it leaves it out, and if it can't find the product, it says so.
Show a verdict card (Good deal, Fair price or Worth waiting) with a two-sentence reason, how far my price is from the lowest one found, a table of stores with prices and links, and up to three tips before buying. Add a line saying it's not financial advice.
Style: deep navy background, amber and mint accents, Bricolage Grotesque and Lora fonts.What this does: You type what you're about to buy and the price in front of you. The app searches the web for what 2 to 4 big stores charge right now, then tells you if your price is a good deal, fair, or worth waiting on, with the store prices and links side by side. It's a quick second opinion before you let a store's own AI assistant, like Alexa, make the call.
See what's really happening in every deal
Aligned shows you what buyers are doing between meetings inside your most important deals then surfaces the risks, openings, and next steps. No more guessing where a deal stands or finding out a champion went quiet too late. Just real visibility, so you can act before it's too late.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Shop for you over text, comparing products, checking a year of price history and ordering only after you approve, as Alexa now does.
❌ Still Can't: Give you a neutral second opinion. It works inside Amazon's store, so checking other stores is still on you.
✅ AI Can Now: Run a trading plan for months in a game market and come out ahead, as Anthropic says its newest Claude models did in an EVE Online replay.
❌ Still Can't: Reliably bet on where prices go next. When told to trade on news, Anthropic says results got much worse, and only about half of Fable 5's runs made money.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff spent years tracing how tech companies turned what we search, say and buy into predictions about what we'll do next, and then into products. It's long and sometimes heavy going, but it's the book to read before you let a shopping agent learn your habits. You'll look at every "recommended for you" a little differently.
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How was today's edition?
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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