The Viewer Journey Is the Brief
Helen Keelan leads General Market sales for LG Ad Solutions Europe, the advertising arm of LG Electronics that launched in the region four years ago and doubled in size in a single year. She makes the case that the most valuable thing about advertising on an LG TV is not the screen itself but the data that comes with being the manufacturer.
“Because we’re the manufacturer, we have all of the viewership data on what people are watching on their LG TV. If you want to understand the real viewer journey, ACR data is where it starts.”
Helen Keelan is Head of Sales, General Market Europe at LG Ad Solutions, the advertising business of LG Electronics. LG Ad Solutions has access to 200 million LG TVs globally and around 27 million across the EU5. Helen leads the team selling CTV video and home screen placements to non-endemic brands across the travel, automotive, luxury, pharma, food and drink, and financial services categories.
Helen built her career across the programmatic and CTV supply side, spending over four years at Magnite where she progressed from Account Director on the Buyer Team to Demand Lead covering UK and Nordics. Before Magnite, she worked in programmatic at ESI Media and 1XL. She joined LG Ad Solutions as Senior Sales Director in January 2024 and moved into the Head of Sales role in December 2025.
She is also a part-time education mentor with Refugee Education UK, delivering weekly sessions supporting ESOL qualifications. LG Ad Solutions Europe was nine people when Helen joined and twenty by the time of this episode. She describes the culture as startup energy backed by the infrastructure of one of the world’s largest electronics companies, with a strong culture of sharing campaign proof points and being visibly out in market.
“No viewer journey on an LG TV looks the same. Having a view of all those behaviours changes how every brief gets answered.”
“The big USP is the data. As the manufacturer, we have all the viewership data, ACR, app usage, and device data.”
Every SSP, DSP, and streaming app can sell impressions on a connected TV. What they cannot do is tell you what that household watched across every source before and after your ad, which apps are installed, how many minutes each one gets, whether the household has a PlayStation plugged in, and what games they play on it. That contextual layer is only accessible to the manufacturer. LG Ad Solutions’s entire commercial case rests on making that data useful: incremental reach against audiences who have already seen a linear campaign, sequential cross-screen messaging to people who have seen an LG ad, and custom audience segments built from specific viewing behaviour.
“The LG home screen is the first thing you see when you turn on the TV. That is the moment we own.”
Fifty per cent of all time spent on LG TVs is in ad-free environments. Streaming on Netflix, Disney, or YouTube without a subscription means no mid-roll. The only moment an advertiser can reach that viewer is before they choose their content. The home screen placement runs at that moment, in a format that is unique to the manufacturer: a full-width video unit that runs 3D animations, interactive activations, and deep links directly into apps. The IG Group campaign during the US election, the PlayStation Astrobot 3D character, and the fact that running both home screen and CTV video together consistently lifts branding metrics more than either alone are the proof points Helen uses most.
“A single-partner CTV strategy leaves audiences uncovered. Build a real mix.”
The fragmented nature of CTV is not a problem to be solved by finding the biggest single vendor. It is an accurate reflection of how viewers actually behave: dipping between linear, SVOD, AVOD, FAST, gaming hubs, and fitness apps in a single evening. Helen’s advice to marketers entering CTV for the first time is to meet all of the vendors, understand each data set, and build a plan that accounts for the different moments and different viewer states rather than optimising for one environment at the cost of others.
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