Connected TV is the most psychologically powerful screen in the room. Here is why.

LG Ad Solutions is the advertising business of LG Electronics. We sit at the intersection of one of the largest TV-manufacturer footprints in the world (around 200 million LG TVs globally) and the connected-TV advertising opportunity those devices represent. The business covers programmatic CTV, sponsored content, home-screen placements, and increasingly the data-and-measurement work that lets brands plan and prove out their CTV investment.

Connected TV is not your grandmother's TV. The TV in the room is the same physical object, but everything around it has changed: the viewing behaviour, the discovery layer, the data, the addressability, the measurement. Brands that approach CTV as linear with an internet cable miss the structural change. The platform is closer to a giant phone than to a passive broadcast surface.

Every viewing session on a connected TV starts with a discovery moment. The viewer turns the TV on, the home screen loads, and on average around 10 minutes pass before the viewer settles into a piece of content. That 10-minute window is the most underappreciated piece of attention real estate on the largest screen in the home. Brands that show up in it (well, with the right format, with content rather than interruption) earn a meaningful moment that doesn't happen anywhere else.

The home screen is unusual because the viewer is in a different mode. They are not in content. They are choosing content. They are open to suggestion, open to discovery, open to a recommendation. That is a different opportunity than the standard mid-roll inside a streaming show. The brands that have leaned into this surface (entertainment franchises, automotive, luxury) are seeing brand-lift numbers that justify it.

A lot of the early conversation about CTV was performance-led: lower-funnel measurement, attribution, household-level reach. Those things matter. They are not the whole story. CTV is also the largest screen in the home and one of the most attention-rich environments in the media plan. Brand storytelling on this surface is genuinely powerful, and the discipline is measuring it properly so it gets the credit. We've invested heavily in the measurement stack that lets brands plan and prove out both the brand outcomes and the performance outcomes from a single CTV investment.

Marketing leadership is art and science. The science is the data, the measurement, the attribution, the optimisation. The art is the storytelling, the creative judgement, the brand voice, the cultural relevance. The discipline I push on the team is to hold both. The data-only marketer optimises themselves into a corner because they only know what they can measure. The art-only marketer cannot defend the investment because they cannot prove the return. Hold both. That is what the CMO role requires in the AI era.

The discovery layer is changing again. For 20 years we optimised for search engines. For the last two years we have started to optimise for answer engines. The next layer is agentic SEO: AI assistants that don't just respond to a query but act on the user's behalf, deciding which brands to surface, which products to recommend, which decisions to take. The brand that is not present in the data the agent draws on is the brand that is not in the consideration set. That is a new kind of distribution problem.

Connected TV plays into this because the home environment is becoming the surface where agentic experiences will increasingly happen. The TV plus the voice assistant plus the connected appliances form an ecosystem that knows what the household is doing, what it likes, what it needs. The brand that is fluent in that ecosystem is the brand the agent surfaces. The brand that is invisible to it is the brand the agent never mentions.

I hire for curiosity and the willingness to operate at the intersection of disciplines. CTV is messy: it touches measurement, ad-tech, creative, distribution, data science, and brand. The marketer who is comfortable being a translator across those disciplines (and humble about what they do not yet know) is the marketer who builds the function. The technician-only marketer or the strategist-only marketer struggles in this environment.

AI is the leverage layer. It accelerates the analysis, the content variation, the optimisation, the reporting. The judgement is still human. The judgement is where the multiplier sits. The marketer who treats AI as a teammate (briefing it well, editing its output, holding the bar on quality) is several times more productive than the marketer who refuses to use it. The marketer who treats AI as a replacement for judgement produces volume but does not produce quality.

The advice I'd give the version of myself starting out: take the role at the intersection rather than the role inside a single discipline. The best opportunities for marketers in the next five years are in the connector roles: measurement plus creative, brand plus data, CTV plus retail media. The single-discipline path is being commoditised. The intersection is where the work is.