TV data, insight, and measurement. company LG Ads is scaling up their business this year after a global rebrand and dozens of new partnerships. Formerly known as Alphonso Inc., its technology provides a unified platform for planning, activation, and measurement across Linear TV, Digital Video, and CTV Advertising.
“The goal for LG Ads is to be an entity where clients, such as brands or agencies, can work with us directly to get exclusive LG CTV ad inventory and utilize our targeting data coming from a wide variety of Smart TV brands,” says Raghu Kodige, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of LG Ads. “We help them optimize for both reach and frequency, tap into new audience segments and ensure their ads reach their precise target audience at just the right time, in just the right context on social and digital media. Lastly, in order to ensure all of this is working well, we provide attribution and measurement capabilities to tie advertising back to business outcomes, one of our core strengths for many years.”
As consumers have been spending more time at home this past year, TV streaming services have become even more ubiquitous. Similarly, Smart TVs and CTV/OTT devices have seen a surge in popularity. 15% of consumers have already cut the cord on their cable subscriptions, and an additional 27% of consumers plan to do the same by the end of 2021. Streaming consumption on CTV/OTT devices and Smart TVs currently accounts for over 68% of overall television viewing (The Trade Desk).
In January, the TV insights brand merged with LG and officially changed its name to LG Ads to provide more clarity about what products this company offers. “We have been working with the LG team for a long time, where we were accessing data from LG TVs in order to power our targeting and measurement products. That partnership stepped up to another level this year when LG took a majority investment in Alphonso,” says Kodige. “With the rebrand to LG Ads, we wanted to make it easier for marketers and other agencies to understand what we really do. Our conversations since the name change have been very well-received. People understand that they are receiving LG inventory directly from the source, layered with targeting data from a number of smart TV brands, along with the in-flight analytics that we are known for.”
The rebrand is also helping LG Ads gain footing in the global marketplace. “Even though we are talking about this from a U.S.-centric perspective, the LG Ads unit is a global unit and our goal is to bring these experiences and advertising opportunities to all countries,” Kodige explains. “We don’t just want to be limited to the U.S. and North America, but also plan to expand into Europe, South America, and Asia. We are building out the technology, the platform, the sales team on a global basis. It’s another reason why we adopted this new name. While Alphonso is very well-known in the U.S. market, we wanted to make sure that there was immediate recognition of the LG brand and what we were trying to do with LG Ads world-wide. It made it much easier for us to fuse that together and market this product globally.”
On the consumer side, LG Ads wants to use their technology to point overwhelmed consumers in the right direction in terms of the available content on their devices. “Consumers are always number one,” Kodige says. “Because if you can provide the consumer with the right experience and the ability to find the content they want to watch, they will use your TV more and be loyal to your brand.”
“Everyday there is a new content provider coming into the market, whether it was Disney+ and HBO Max last year, or Paramount+ and Peacock after that. For the ordinary consumer, it’s a bit confusing,” he continues. “They want to stop subscribing to cable, but on the other hand they’re paying for five separate streaming subscriptions, and are still missing out on some of the content they want to watch. Our goal as this joint entity [with LG] is to address this. We want to understand what people are really watching on TV and then recommend things that they should be watching – taking into account their current subscriptions.”
On the business side, LG Ads helps advertisers shift their marketing spend to the platforms consumers are engaging with most and target more specific audiences. The brand works with many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to provide insights and data across a multitude of TV brands and streaming platforms.
“We have partnerships with multiple Smart TV OEMs,” Kodige tells Brand Innovators. “There are 15-20 more OEMs joining this partnership, giving us an advantage of scale and diversity. If you partner with one single brand of TV, there are already built-in biases for that data. Our philosophy is to partner with a wide variety of brands that service different sections of the population, which gives us that unique data diversity which is representative of the entire population of the country. When you have that, then advertisers know that by running a campaign with you, they can reach the exact kind of customer they are looking to target and the campaign isn’t biased in one way or another.”
