As with any digital ad campaign, the important thing is to reach streaming audiences who will convert. To that end, Roku’s self-service Ads Manager stands ready with powerful segmentation and targeting options. After all, you know your customers, and we know our streaming audience.

Worried it’s too late to spin up new Black Friday creative? With Roku Ads Manager, you can easily import and augment existing creative assets from your social channels. We also have AI-assisted upscaling, so every ad is primed for CTV.

Once you’ve done this, then you can easily set up A/B tests to flight different creative variants and Black Friday offers. If you’re a Shopify brand, you can even run shoppable ads directly on-screen so viewers can purchase with just a click of their Roku remote.

Bonus: we’re gifting you $5K in ad credits when you spend your first $5K on Roku Ads Manager. Just sign up and use code GET5K. Terms apply.

Use code GET5K now

Hey, Josh here. Let’s get into it because Palantir wants a police state of America.

Here's the thing about Alex Karp's recent statement on surveillance: it's not what he said that matters—it's what he's asking us to accept.

In November 2025, Palantir's CEO went on The Axios Show and made a provocative argument: Americans should accept a surveillance state as the price of beating China in AI. His logic? "You will have far fewer rights if America's not in the lead."

It's a neat trick, actually. Present two terrible options—comprehensive government surveillance or Chinese AI dominance—and suddenly surveillance doesn't sound so bad. But here's the kicker: this is a false choice, and Karp knows it.

Let's break down what's really happening here. Palantir just scored a $10 billion Army contract and hundreds of millions to build databases on American citizens. The company's entire business model depends on normalized government surveillance. So when Karp argues that surveillance is a necessary evil for national security, he's not just offering strategic analysis—he's advocating for the exact product his company sells.

The timing is revealing. China's DeepSeek AI breakthrough in January 2025 did shake assumptions about American tech dominance. But the U.S. still controls 90% of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and leads in AI research. The "existential threat" framing conveniently serves institutional purposes: bigger defense budgets, expanded surveillance contracts, policy changes that would otherwise face democratic resistance.

What Karp's argument really does is reframe surveillance from a policy choice into a survival requirement. When something becomes existential, democratic oversight becomes a liability instead of a safeguard. Classification systems kick in, national security exemptions multiply, and suddenly the mechanisms that distinguish democracies from authoritarian states start looking like competitive disadvantages.

Civil liberties organizations aren't buying it. Amnesty International documented how Palantir's technology already enables mass surveillance of migrants and asylum seekers. German activists collected 264,000 signatures opposing Palantir's deployment there. These groups recognize what's at stake: not whether surveillance technology should ever exist, but whether it gets deployed with democratic oversight or normalized as the price of doing business.

The real question Karp's statement raises is this: Can democracies compete with China without becoming like China? If we adopt comprehensive surveillance to maintain technological advantage, we've already lost the thing that supposedly makes Western leadership credible in the first place.

Listen, the competition with China is real. But when a CEO whose company profits from surveillance tells you that surveillance is the only path forward, maybe ask who benefits from that particular framing.