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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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They don't slam the door

Your best performer won't storm into your office.

They'll get easier to manage.

Fewer pushbacks. Fewer ideas. No more arguing about the plan. Their 1:1s get shorter and more pleasant. Everything is fine.

And because they were never the problem, you take the quiet as a good sign. One less thing to worry about in a busy quarter.

Then one Monday in January, a meeting request appears with no agenda. You know what it is before you open it.

By the time they tell you, the decision was made weeks ago. Over a Christmas break, a long weekend, or a call with a recruiter you never knew happened.

Here's the uncomfortable part. The signs were almost always there. We just read them as calm.

Stuck isn't the same as staying

The job market has made this harder to see, not easier.

Gallup's latest data shows 51% of US workers are either actively looking for a new job or watching for one. Gallup

At the same time, 43% say leaving would be too difficult or costly right now. Quartz

Put those together and you get teams full of people who have mentally left but physically stayed. Gallup calls it the Great Detachment. A slow hiring market has kept people in their seats. It hasn't kept them committed.

That's dangerous for a manager, because a full team looks like a stable one. Headcount tells you nothing about who is already drafting their notice in their head. And when the market loosens, the first to go are the people with the most options.

Your best.

Jonathan and the easiest year he ever had

Jonathan led a team of nine. Nadia was the one he'd have cloned. She took the escalations nobody else could handle, trained every new starter, and argued with him in every planning meeting. Sometimes she was right.

Around June, she stopped arguing.

Jonathan noticed and, honestly, enjoyed it. Planning got quicker. She still hit her numbers. When he floated a big project for next year, she said, "Maybe give that to someone else. They could use the stretch." He thought that was generous.

She stopped asking about the senior role. She didn't spend the training budget she'd fought for the year before. Her 1:1s ran twenty minutes and ended with "all good."

She resigned on the second Monday of January. Her exit conversation was polite and short. The real reason came later, from a colleague. She'd felt invisible since the spring, when a promotion went elsewhere and nobody explained why.

Jonathan replayed the year and saw all of it. Every sign had been there. He'd filed each one under "low maintenance."

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Researchers Timothy Gardner and Peter Hom set out to find what actually predicts someone quitting. They collected more than 900 behaviours managers had seen in people before they left, tested them, and narrowed the list to 13 that reliably predicted resignation within the following year. In earlier work, Gardner's team found that when someone showed six or more of these changes, they could predict a departure with around 80% accuracy. SHRM

The obvious clues didn't make the cut. The suit on a Tuesday, the run of dentist appointments, the CV left on the printer. What held up was quieter. Disengagement.

Here are the six I'd watch most closely in a strong performer.

One: they stop committing to the long term. Next year's projects, multi-quarter plans, anything that outlasts the next few months. People planning to leave don't sign up for work they won't finish.

Two: they go quiet in meetings. Fewer ideas, fewer challenges. The person who used to push back now nods. That isn't alignment. It's withdrawal.

Three: they stop trying to impress you. They used to care what you thought of their work. Now review season barely registers.

Four: they lose interest in growth. Training, promotion, the next role. Topics they used to raise themselves simply stop coming up.

Five: they do the job, and only the job. Output holds, but the extra disappears. No more volunteering. No more fixing things that aren't theirs.

Six: their 1:1s get shorter and smoother. "All good" becomes the standard answer. They bring you fewer problems, because they've stopped expecting you to solve them.

One sign on its own means very little. Everyone has a quiet month. What matters is the cluster, and the change from their normal. Compare people with themselves, not with the rest of the team.

Quick poll

A five-minute check before the year ends

Write down the three people whose resignation would hurt your team most.

Next to each name, mark any of the six signs you've seen in the last three months. Be honest. Nobody else will see this.

Then answer one question for each. When did you last ask them what would make them stay?

If anyone has three or more marks, or you can't remember that conversation, they're your priority for the next fortnight. Not because they're definitely leaving. Because you don't know, and not knowing is the risk.

January's resignations get decided in October, November and December. You still have time.

What's waiting below the line

Below is the Stay Playbook, what I'd do this quarter if I suspected my best person was on the way out.

It covers how to map flight risk across your team in ten minutes, the stay conversation and the exact questions to ask, how to raise what you've noticed without it sounding like an accusation, how to match what they tell you to the lever you can actually pull, a word-for-word script for making the case to your own manager when the answer involves money or a role, and what to do if they're going anyway.