The TV manufacturer that knows what you watch is also a serious advertising platform.

I'm Senior Sales Director at LG Ad Solutions Europe. The role is to evangelise connected TV and help brands understand the advertising opportunity across LG TVs in Europe, and the data opportunities alongside that. As the manufacturer of the TV, we have ACR data, app-usage data, viewership data, and device data, which makes the advertising opportunities much richer.

Globally we have access to 200 million LG TVs, and in Europe it's about 27 million across the EU5. Wherever there is an LG TV, there is an advertising opportunity. LG Electronics has been around a long time; LG Ad Solutions launched in Europe four years ago, based in London. Since then we have doubled in size over the last year. It feels like a startup, with the backing of a global electronics company.

There are two main products today. CTV video is what most brands think of when they think of CTV: a 30-second slot inside content, the same idea as a linear TV spot, but on LG TVs running across free ad-supported content being consumed on the TV.

The other is the home-screen placement, which is more unusual. The home screen is the very first screen you see when you turn on an LG TV. It's a large video-enabled placement at the top, running while the viewer is thinking about what to watch before they settle into the viewing experience. We've been getting more playful with the creative on it, enabling 3D and animated formats. We ran a recent campaign with PlayStation for their Astro Bot character; three 3D variations of Astro Bot doing a dance, cape rippling. IG Group, the investment platform, ran a home-screen execution during the US election promoting US stocks, with a face that was Kamala on one side and Trump on the other. The engagement on it was significant.

Plenty of CTV providers are in the market, and many are our partners (streaming apps are accessible through the TV). The USP for working with LG is the data. ACR (automated content recognition) picks up what people are watching on their LG TV. webOS, the TV's operating system, has the app-usage data: which apps are installed, which are opened, how many minutes are spent in them. Device-level data tells us whether the household is a gamer, whether they have a PlayStation or Xbox plugged in, what games they're playing. That stack lets a brand target on content consumption and on ad exposure.

The primary example is incremental reach. A brand might want to exclude households already exposed to a campaign on linear, and use the CTV opportunity as an incremental layer to find new audiences. The ACR data is what makes that exclusion possible.

Briefs come through asking for 25-to-35 gamers with dogs, and the data opportunities (combined with third-party data partnerships) make a lot of that possible. The constraint is always scale. The narrower the targeting, the fewer reachable households, and the brand gives up reach and recognition and fame. You have to think about both. The richer use cases are interest-based, built on content consumed: some brands have already researched what programmes their customers watch, and we can build a custom segment from that programme list, or from app usage (for instance, fitness-app users for a health-and-wellness audience).

For someone listening who's considering a CTV strategy, meet LG, meet Samsung, meet the FAST partners, meet the SVOD giants (Netflix, Disney). Understand the data opportunities and content opportunities for each. Where being the manufacturer matters is that we see how different the viewer paths are; one household watches a workout on the TV, another watches SVOD, another is gaming. Having a mix of partners is important to reach people across those different environments. 50% of all time spent on LG TVs is in ad-free environments. The home-screen unit is what reaches those audiences, because it sits before any of that ad-free time begins.

LG works across two categories internally. Endemic advertisers are the always-on entertainment companies and streaming-app clients. When you turn on a TV, you're thinking what am I going to watch; seeing an ad for a new programme is a seamless path to the click and the launch.

General-market advertisers are pharma, food and drink, travel, automotive, luxury. Travel, automotive, and luxury are particularly strong verticals for LG, because the audience tends to be affluent. LG TVs aren't the cheapest on the market; people who buy them tend to invest more in a quality product (good gaming spec, OLED), and our advertiser portfolio reflects that.

TV remains the greatest brand-builder, and the majority of campaigns we run still have mass reach and brand awareness as the main KPI. We work with measurement partners like Lucid on the impact on branding metrics: recall, consideration, awareness. With the data we're getting more campaigns with different objectives: site traffic measurement (looking at how someone who saw an ad on an LG TV went on to the site afterwards); app instals and launches following a content ad; and content-watched metrics (someone seeing an ad for a new series and then downloading the app and watching). Different objectives, depending on the brand.

We tend to run CTV video and home screen together for a lot of campaigns, because we see higher lift in branding metrics when both formats run. Zooming out to the wider funnel, the data lets us play with incrementality against the brand's linear activity, or build on it, or deep-link an ad into YouTube to promote sponsored content the brand has elsewhere. The TV is the centre of multiple viewer paths, which gives the media mix more places to be collaborative.

Everyone second-screens; attention spans are short and a quick look at the phone while watching TV is common. There are opportunities there: ACR data lets us do sequential messaging, reaching people on their mobiles after they've seen an ad on the LG TV. Research from attention partners like Lumen in the UK shows people are less likely to second-screen when co-viewing (watching together is a social experience and the second screen drops out of the equation). That tells brands something about time of day and the kind of programming where attention will be highest.

Over three in four households now have a smart TV connected to the internet. The behaviour isn't binary: nobody is purely linear or purely streaming or purely BVOD. Everyone does a bit of everything depending on mood and programme. So the discipline for a brand is to include SVOD, FAST, streaming, and linear together.

We've launched hubs on the home screen: sports hub, gaming hub, music hub. People are increasingly relying on the device itself for these different behaviours (workouts, checking scores, gaming). As a consequence, HDMI usage has declined. The less the household needs to plug in an additional device to add a capability, the more the TV is supporting the consumer's needs directly. PlayStations and Xboxes aren't going anywhere, but the user path is becoming more seamless: gaming apps can be downloaded onto the LG TV; you can jump into a console from the gaming hub.

There's a new product every week, which keeps it interesting. A major push on shoppable: scanning QR codes from the screen to find out more about a product, but more importantly LG Electronics announcing a webOS payment solution that lets users save card details to the TV. That would make buying products or ordering services directly from the TV much faster, through a single click. For brands, that's significant.