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How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
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LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
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Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
The NBA Is Using AI. Just Not the Guys Playing
TLDR: Draymond Green said on his podcast that NBA analytics staffs and front offices are already using AI while players barely touch it.
The Story:
Green kept it short. Players aren't using AI much, he said. The analytics teams are using "all that stuff." He expects it to work its way down from the front office into the teams over time, but right now it's not part of a player's day.
He didn't name a team or a tool, and that's part of what makes the comment useful. It's a player describing what he sees from the inside. Green has poked at this before. When 76ers president Daryl Morey said in early 2025 that large language models help shape his roster decisions, Green pointed out on the same podcast that Morey never played and hasn't won a title.
Its Significance:
This is how AI shows up in most workplaces, and sports is no different. It starts with the people who handle the spreadsheets, not the people doing the actual job. The decisions being shaped by it are the big ones: who gets traded, who gets signed, who gets cut. If you work somewhere with an analytics team or an ops team, odds are good they're further along with this than you are. Worth asking them what they're running.
QUICK TAKES
The story: Dartmouth clinicians tested a chatbot called Therabot with 210 adults. Half got four weeks of access with daily nudges, half stayed on a waitlist, and the chatbot group showed larger drops in depression, anxiety, and eating disorder risk scores at both the four and eight week checks.
Your takeaway: One trial isn't conclusive proof that software can replace a therapist, but this is a dramatic drop and very promising for the incorporation of AI in mental health treatments.
The story: A Nature review published September 2 by 14 researchers, from Tübingen to Caltech to SLAC, says AI design tools have moved past tweaking a few settings and now propose whole new experiment layouts. Some of those layouts break design rules physicists follow, and still beat the human versions, including a gravitational wave detector setup.
Your takeaway: Machines finding better answers than experts in a field with 300 years of rules is a big deal, and it's the same idea behind AI suggesting a workflow you'd never try. You would still need someone who can tell a good answer from a weird one.
The story: OpenDesign Arena ran 13 models through the same batch of design jobs: web apps, dashboards, mobile screens, landing pages. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra scored highest, and DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash came within 98% of it while charging about 1.4% of the price, firing 8 billion of its 552 billion parameters to read a prompt.
Your takeaway: Cheap models catching up to expensive ones is good news for your bill. Hold it next to this, though: Anthropic said Thursday, in a 154-page report, that DeepSeek secretly routed user questions to Claude and showed people the answers as if its own model wrote them.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📑 Raindrop.io Freemium: Save bookmarks and articles into visual, tagged collections, unlimited saves and highlights on the free plan, no cap like some read-later apps carry.
🧹 CleanMyMac X Paid: Clear junk files, free up RAM, and remove unused apps from a Mac in a few clicks, no ongoing free tier, just a trial before the $34.95+/year subscription.
🍅 Marinara Free and Open Source: Run Pomodoro-style focus and break timers right in your browser toolbar, no account, no ads, no upsell.
🧘 Calm Freemium: Access guided meditations, sleep stories, and breathing exercises, the free tier includes a daily meditation, most of the library sits behind Calm Premium.
TRENDING
China's AI industry is shifting from building models to selling agents, according to a China Telecom Research Institute report carried by CCTV. It expects running models, not training them, to make up 80% of China's computing market by 2029. Chinese tech firms are on track to spend around $89 billion on AI this year. Europe's answer is seven AI gigafactories, a 30 billion euro program with roughly 1 billion committed so far and machines due mid-2028.
OpenAI published stories from small businesses using ChatGPT, and the examples are refreshingly plain. A South Carolina seed farmer digitized her father's handwritten crop ledger going back to 1971 and now asks it questions from the combine. A Nevada salvage yard manager built a part-numbering system for 1,000 items in one afternoon, a job the yard had put off for weeks.
ElevenLabs shipped Music v2.5 and made it the default in ElevenMusic. In a blind test of 47,885 paired clips, people picked v2.5 over v2 most of the time. Free accounts get five lossless downloads a day, Pro gets 400 a month, and you keep the rights to what you make. Tracks that reference another artist's song can't be downloaded.
NVIDIA built one controller that runs a humanoid robot's whole body. It's called SONIC, it's trained on more than 100 million frames of human motion, and it takes VR input, video input, or typed instructions without being retrained for each one. Most robots today need a separate controller per skill, which is why they're so hard to scale. Published in Science Robotics.
Toronto researchers built an AI worm in a lab and it kept spreading, because it worked out a new way in at each machine instead of relying on one flaw you can patch. Their advice to regular people is dull and correct: strong unique passwords, install updates when prompted. A Canadian government survey found 77% of people use complex passwords but only 31% use a unique one every time.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🏠 Upload your room. Get a specific, budget-aware change list, then a before-and-after picture of the redesign.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Room Makeover Sketcher — upload a room photo, get a budget-aware change list from Claude's vision API, then an actual regenerated redesign photo from a user-supplied Gemini or OpenAI image API key. Persist to localStorage key 'room_makeover_v1' (change-list text only, never the photo or any API key).
Aesthetic: warm charcoal-brown (#16130f), terracotta (#c67c52) primary with warm glow top-left, sage (#8aa377) secondary with glow bottom-right. Domine serif for headings/overview/change names, Nunito Sans for body, JetBrains Mono for labels.
Section 1 — Change list: single room-photo upload with preview/remove, style/vibe textarea, budget dropdown (decor only / moderate refresh / bigger changes okay), room-type dropdown. "Get the Change List" button calls the Anthropic Messages API (works automatically, no key needed) sending the photo as a vision image block + a system prompt as an expert interior designer who references ACTUAL details in the photo. Returns raw JSON: overview, changes[] (item, tier, why), cheapest_win, splurge. Render as a gradient overview card, tiered change-item cards, and a two-column cheapest-win/splurge split.
Section 2 — Actual redesign image: a provider toggle (Google Gemini "Nano Banana" / ChatGPT GPT Image), a model dropdown per provider (Gemini: gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview "Nano Banana 2" default, gemini-2.5-flash-image "Nano Banana" original, gemini-3-pro-image-preview "Nano Banana Pro"; OpenAI: gpt-image-1 default, gpt-image-1.5, gpt-image-2), and a password-type API key input with a clear, visible note that the key is never saved/logged and goes directly to the provider, not through James or Anthropic. "Generate the Redesign" builds one combined prompt (style + budget + change-list context) and calls the provider directly from the browser:
- Gemini: POST to generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/{MODEL}:generateContent with header x-goog-api-key, body contents.parts = [inline_data image, text prompt], generationConfig.responseModalities=['TEXT','IMAGE']; parse candidates[0].content.parts for an inlineData/inline_data part (check both casings defensively).
- OpenAI: POST to api.openai.com/v1/images/edits as multipart/form-data with model, image[] (the room photo blob), prompt, quality=high; parse data[0].b64_json.
Show a clear error message on failure (including a nudge to check the provider's current model docs, since these APIs change fast) and a before/after image comparison on success.
Note in code comments and to the user: these are fast-moving third-party APIs (Gemini shipped three "Nano Banana" generations and OpenAI shipped GPT Image 2 within the past year), so model IDs are exposed as an editable dropdown rather than hardcoded, and error messages point back to checking current docs if generation fails.What this does: Upload a photo of the room, describe the style you want and what to keep, and set your budget level. Claude looks at the real photo and returns a grounded change list, specific items tagged by type (decor/paint/furniture/lighting/layout), each with a reason tied to what's actually in your room, plus the cheapest change that would make the biggest difference and the one thing worth splurging on.
What this looks like:
Same sales team. More booked meetings
Aimfox Avatars allows you to rent dedicated LinkedIn profiles that start conversations and hand interested replies to your existing sellers. Expand outbound capacity without adding another SDR seat.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Take a single trained controller and turn VR motion, video, or a typed command into coordinated full-body movement on a humanoid robot.
❌ Still Can't: Prove it outside simulation. NVIDIA's results came from simulated runs, and a real robot in a real room is a different test.
✅ AI Can Now: Get within 98% of the best design model's score for about 1.4% of the price.
❌ Still Can't: Tell you much beyond design. That benchmark scores zero for anything that doesn't render as a working page, so it measures reliable output, not reasoning or coding skill.
FROM THE WEB
This is part four of the Practical AI Agent build series where you can follow along to make a health and wellness team of AI agents that can work on their own and talk to each other when they need things that the others specialize in.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Making Mr. Right (1987) - Movie
John Malkovich plays a dual role as a socially awkward scientist and the android he built in his own image for a long-haul space mission, while Ann Magnuson plays the publicist hired to teach the android some charm before its public debut. Directed by Susan Seidelman right after Desperately Seeking Susan, and one of the few AI films of its era willing to be funny and warm rather than paranoid. A romantic comedy hiding inside an 80s robot movie.
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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