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.

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Customers like new ideas. They are less enthusiastic about having to relearn everything to use them.

That’s the challenge facing every innovative startup. The product must feel different enough to earn attention, but familiar enough to understand, trust, and try.

Too little novelty and it feels forgettable. Too much and the customer is suddenly processing a new category, new vocabulary, new interface, and new behavior all at once.

The sweet spot is not simply new.

It’s new, with something familiar to hold onto.

Industrial designer Raymond Loewy described this balance through the MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.

People are attracted to progress, but they also need enough familiarity to understand what they are seeing and imagine themselves using it. A successful innovation stretches expectations without snapping the customer’s frame of reference. The Interaction Design Foundation describes MAYA as making products progressive while keeping them within the user’s comfort zone.

This does not mean disguising an ambitious product as something ordinary.

It means giving customers something recognizable to hold while they reach for something new.

A new financial platform can introduce sophisticated intelligence through familiar accounts and goals. A radically different collaboration tool can place its capabilities inside recognizable documents, comments, and folders. An unfamiliar service can be explained through an analogy customers already understand.

Familiarity provides the bridge. Without it, customers may admire the destination but hesitate to cross.

Peloton did not ask people to invent a new kind of exercise.

It combined two experiences customers already understood: riding a stationary bike and attending an instructor-led fitness class. The innovation was bringing the energy, instruction, music, competition, and community of the studio into the home through connected hardware and live or on-demand content.

Peloton describes its experience as a combination of connected technology, instructor-led content, and community designed to bring immersive fitness into the home. Its About Us page makes the proposition clear: the delivery model is innovative, but the underlying experience remains recognizable.

Customers did not need to understand connected-fitness economics or streaming infrastructure.

All they had to do is recognize the promise: a great cycling class, now available at home.

The technology changed where the experience happened without making the experience itself feel alien.

Convincing people to eat more plant-based protein could have required entirely new recipes, shopping habits, and meal rituals.

Beyond Meat reduced that burden by starting with products people already knew how to buy, cook, and eat: burgers, ground beef, sausages, and steak.

The company’s flagship Beyond Burger was explicitly designed to look, cook, and taste like a traditional beef burger. The ingredients and broader proposition were different, but the shape, preparation, meal occasion, and expected experience remained recognizable.

That gave customers permission to try something new without first becoming different people.

They did not need to adopt an entirely new food culture. They could place a plant-based patty on the same grill and inside the same bun.

Sometimes the easiest way to change behavior is to preserve the ritual surrounding it.

A familiarity anchor is the part of your product story that helps customers quickly orient themselves.

It can take several forms:

Describe the product using a category customers already recognize, then explain the important difference.

“An accounting platform built for creators” is easier to process than an invented category that requires its own glossary.

Preserve an action customers already know how to perform.

Swiping, dragging, subscribing, booking, commenting, and searching can make a new experience feel usable before someone has mastered its deeper capabilities.

Connect the innovation to a result customers already want.

The underlying technology may be unprecedented. The desired outcome may still be straightforward: finish faster, make fewer mistakes, feel more secure, or understand what to do next.

Show that the product works with established technologies, credible partners, existing workflows, or recognized standards.

Proof reduces the sense that customers must gamble on an entirely new ecosystem.

I often think founders spend too much time perfecting what makes their product different and too little time identifying what will make that difference approachable.

Customers need both.

When presenting a new concept, ask potential customers two separate questions:

If people understand everything but feel no curiosity, the concept may be too familiar.

If they find it fascinating but cannot explain what it does, who it’s for, or how they would use it, the concept may be too foreign.

Tools such as Lyssna can help founders test product descriptions, visual directions, and positioning concepts with target audiences. Its preference tests and surveys can reveal which ideas create intrigue, which create uncertainty, and where customers need a stronger reference point.

The goal is not to eliminate every question a consumer may have.

It’s to make the first question “How can I try this?” rather than “What on earth is this?”

Customers want progress, but they rarely want to feel lost.

Give them something new enough to create excitement and something familiar enough to create confidence.

The future becomes much easier to enter when the front door still looks like a door.

Best,

Edwin