With smart TV home screens increasingly the entry point for consumers’ TV viewing LG also wants it to be the living room front page for advertisers.
During its NewFronts pitch to ad buyers in New York City on Monday the smart TV maker unveiled new features and capabilities for brands to utilize and users to engage with the prime TV real estate, alongside partnerships to improve measurement, targeting and data insights.
The latest updates and partnerships for the home screen, powered by LG’s WebOS TV operating system, are meant to inject interactivity that drives action, which in turn makes results and impact more easily measurable for brands.
To that end LG is following the likes of other similar OEMs (such as Samsung and Vizio) and teaming up with BrightLine to offer interactive ad formats starting in Q3 in the US and Canada, with global expansion to follow. And it’s bringing shoppability to the smart TV platform with ad units that include QR codes and add-to-cart functionality. Those units are currently available in the US, with coming rollouts in the UK and Europe.
Also coming to the home screen – in what LG says is first to market – are 3D native home screen ads. Per the electronics maker, these first-of-its-kind 3D ad creatives are designed to be immersive and capture attention for brands, including through prominent home screen placement. In 2024 LG home screen ad placements grew by over 100%, the company said (without providing a base figure).
“The LG Home Screen is the new front page of the living room—where discovery begins with undivided attention. It’s a bold new environment for advertisers, now home to our first-of-its-kind 3D Native format,” said Esther Maguire, head of Product Marketing & Strategy at LG Ad Solutions. “This creative doesn’t just sit on the screen—it jumps off of it. Visually striking, immersive, and built for impact, it takes storytelling beyond the frame and into the living room."
It’s also looking to make access to home screen inventory easier by partnering with Magnite to enable programmatic buying of the premium native home screen units through SpringServe, with guaranteed buys through ClearLine.
“Native home-screen ads present a valuable opportunity for advertisers to engage consumers right at the moment of content discovery, when attention is high and choices are actively being made,” said Mike Laband, group SVP of Revenue at Magnite. “This important milestone in our ongoing collaboration with LG Ad Solutions brings the power of programmatic to one of TV’s most valuable touchpoints, helping brands unlock the full potential of the LG Home Screen like never before.”
Social video, gaming hub joining LG smart TVs
There are also new home screen additions meant to both engage and serve users, as well as the advertisers that want to be where they are – with the launch of a gaming hub and a new partnership to bring social media content to the TV screen.
On the social front LG announced a collaboration with Spaceback to extend social video like Instagram Stories and TikToks to the smart TV screen, both for users to enjoy and so advertisers can pursue unified, cross-platform campaigns. That’s launching globally in Q3.
As for the gaming hub, LG didn’t disclose a ton of details but said users would be able to “unlock console-quality gaming directly though LG TVs” – which offers brands “early, authenticated access to a highly engaged gaming audience”
In terms of data, LG is unlocking global automatic content recognition (ACR) data access with the launch of a scaled platform that allows marketers to tap the smart TV maker's ACR data – which provides glass-level insights about what content is being consumed on-screen – to inform media buys.
"With the launch of our global data business, LG Ad Solutions is putting one of the world’s most robust ACR data sets directly at a brand’s fingertips—transforming premium screens into powerful engines of insight,” said Julian Zilberbrand, global head of Data Solutions at LG Ad Solutions. “From advanced viewing signals to AI-powered tools, we're making privacy-first data more accessible and actionable than ever, empowering smarter decisions and deeper engagement worldwide."
Don’t forget the content
And of course, for LG’s new ad capabilities and integrations to be meaningful to advertisers, there needs to be consumers engaging with the home screen and content offerings from the smart TV maker.
Stats from the data indicate users are engaging. LG said viewers on average spend nearly 10 minutes navigating before landing on content to watch and that 2 in 5 rely on the home screen to help make their content viewing choices.
"CTV is no longer a side dish—it’s the main course. As 90% of consumers become reachable through streaming platforms, advertisers must center their strategies around the biggest screen in the home,” said Tony Marlow, CMO at LG Ad Solutions. “With two in five viewers using the TV home screen to guide their journey, it’s clear: the living room is the new front row."
On the content front LG touted LG Channels (its built-in free ad-supported streaming TV aka FAST service) as now a top-five ranked service on LG TVs in terms of usage - with over half of LG users calling it “their favorite.”
LG Channels already has over 4,000 free streaming channels globally and more than 350 in the US. On Monday it announced a new addition – a 50 Cent Action Channel that’s launching on LG Channels, curated by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson.