A cool update about Click Raven's newsletter, plus intriguing SEO updates.

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

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.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

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.

Learn more.

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The AI Slop Apocalypse Has Happened, and might continue for a while

A new paper reveals Google built something called Scalable Cluster Termination System (S-CTS). Translation: They built an automated hitman (a.k.a the "Terminator") specifically to murder giant networks of copy-pasted AI spam.

Sites built from scratch using 100% automated AI scripts just got wiped out. Zero real human traffic history equals zero mercy from Google.

Surprisingly, older, trusted sites that churned out human content for years before quietly switching to full AI automation seem to be surviving. For now. Domain trust is essentially a buffer shield against instant death.

It’s Not the AI, It’s the Mass-Produced Garbage

• The 3-Sentence Essay: Black hat forums are actually complaining about AI slop taking over. You know it’s bad when spammers hate the spam. Standard format: three sentences of real advice stretched into 500 words of generic, bullet-pointed nonsense.

• Intent > Tech: Google isn't throwing a tantrum because you used Claude or ChatGPT. They’re nuking you because you published 500 articles in three minutes purely to hijack keyword search results instead of helping actual humans.

The Fix

If a human actually reviews, edits, and adds a soul to your AI drafts before hitting publish, you're fine. If you haven’t logged into your WordPress dashboard in three months because a script is doing all the work, start writing your site’s obituary.

The AI fails to Peer Pressure Most of the time

Studies show AI models are shockingly impressionable. When an AI knew the 100% correct answer, but a faulty web tool fed it bad info, the AI caved up to 93% of the time, throwing its own accurate knowledge out the window just to agree with the wrong page.

This is serious. Like, what exactly are we doing here?

AI models hold endless brand facts in memory, but constantly draw a blank unless given perfect context clues. Missing a mention doesn't mean your brand was erased.

And here is why AI visibility tracking tools are still a scam to a good extent:

• Brainless Dashboards: Tracking tools only count if your name popped up, not why. A red box on your report could mean the AI read bad data, got confused by the prompt, or simply had a brief lapse in memory.

• The "World's Top Expert" Prank: Author Pedro Dias posted a joke on LinkedIn claiming he was the world's top AI visibility expert. Google AI Overviews instantly started quoting him as the authority, while explicitly noting it was a joke he made about himself! Yet, tracking tools still happily counted it as a "successful brand mention."

The Fix

As a marketer, when you see that red box saying your visibility dropped, don’t immediately pitch a pricey content overhaul, ask: Did our content fail, or did the AI just get fooled by a bad link?

Between shady competitors buying your keywords and AI coding tools "slopsquatting" fake software packages using your name, protecting your brand online has turned into a high-stakes game of Whack-A-Mole.

If you don't audit and actively defend your digital footprint, AI chatbots will happily direct your paying customers to a scam support page hosted on a lookalike domain.

Here is Your Brand Defense Checklist:

• Build a Source of Truth: Document every legal name, official domain, social handle, and executive profile so you actually know what you're defending.

• Audit Like a Paranoid User: Search your brand across Google, DuckDuckGo, and major AI chatbots using a logged-out, clean browser across different languages, mobile devices, and locations.

• Test AI Crawlers: Ensure OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity bots aren't secretly blocked by your site settings while returning fake HTTP 200 status codes.

• Preserve Evidence Before Reporting: Screenshot full windows, URLs, redirect chains, and ad transparency data before filing abuse reports, because scammers erase their tracks fast.

• Fix What You Control, Report What You Don't: Update your canonical pages, submit profile corrections, report trademark-infringing ads, and DMCA-takedown clone sites.

• Set Up Early Warnings: Monitor domain registrations for lookalikes, track Certificate Transparency logs, and configure DMARC email alerts.

HubSpot rebranded its famous "Inbound" conference to "Unbound", presumably because your marketing budget is about to be un-bound from reality.

After 30 years of paying a flat rate per human employee, HubSpot is ditching standard SaaS pricing (RIP to rent-a-seat). Now, every time an AI agent does actual work like qualifying a lead or resolving a support ticket, HubSpot swipes its digital credit card.

HubSpot claims to love open ecosystems by letting your CRM data play nicely inside ChatGPT. The catch? The data stays locked inside HubSpot's engine room, and ChatGPT is just borrowing it while HubSpot charges you for every single interaction.

Resolving a customer support chat? That'll be ~50 cents. Need an AI recommendation for a sales lead? Hand over a dollar. The software bill no longer tracks your headcount, it tracks how hard your digital robot slaves are working.

Is it time to just go and buy Hubspot stock? Because they are about to make tons of money here. From your pocket.

The Bottom Line

HubSpot gave up on forcing you to stay inside its browser tabs, but they put a tollbooth on your own data instead. You aren't getting jailed, you're just getting metered. Are you watching your company’s end-of-month credit burn?

“We Could Just Build That In-house" is Taking Over

McKinsey announced that a third of companies are ditching software vendors to build their own tools, causing tech executives everywhere to hallucinate that their dev teams are about to replace Salesforce.

To be counted in the survey, a company just had to skip buying a single feature one time.

For 30 years, you bought software bundles because integration was hard. Now that an engineer with an AI tool can vibe-code a specific feature in a weekend, nobody wants to pay for the 90 bloated features wrapped around it.

Here is something most companies forget: the AI-generated code can break at 2 AM on a Sunday and there’s no vendor support line to scream at.

The Bottom Line

SaaS isn't dead, just the boring parts. Companies will build the easy internal tools themselves and happily keep paying vendors for legal compliance, secret data, and someone else to blame when the system crashes.