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This week on SHIFT
Milk is the rare product where supply doesn’t wait for a purchase order. The cows show up at the milking station whether or not anyone ordered butter, which makes AI-driven demand forecasting a stranger problem at Land O’Lakes than at most companies: the whole supply chain has to bend around animals and weather, not the other way around. This week, how AI is helping turn a business built on “push” into one that can pull.
Teddy Bekele is chief technology officer at Land O’Lakes, the $16 billion farmer-owned cooperative, and the first person to hold that title in the company’s 105-year history. He oversees AI, digital transformation, and cybersecurity, and I asked him what gets built when a butter company goes agentic, and what happened when an experiment didn’t land.
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
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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Three things to listen for
1. Chat with the book
Land O’Lakes turned its agronomy library into a conversational “super agent,” so an agronomist can describe a drought and the diseases they’re seeing and get answers back, instead of flipping to “page 367.” A horse-nutrition agent called Checkerboard Connect does something similar with Purina research, turning blood and stool samples into feed recommendations.
2. Don’t say “human in the loop”
Bekele says he dislikes the phrase because it makes the human sound like a ring inside someone else’s circle. His rule: design around the farmer, whose whole farm can ride on one bad call, and the agronomist, then augment their intuition rather than overrule it.
3. Push versus pull, with cows
Supply chains skew toward push because demand is hard to see. AI forecasting is moving Land O’Lakes toward demand-driven production, using weather and holiday spikes to plan herd size, but as Bekele puts it, you can’t tell the cows to produce less milk because demand is down.
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