CMO Tony Marlow On LG’s Direct To Glass Strategy
In the latest Innovator Spotlight video from our report FASTs Are The New Cable, Part 2: Advertising, LG Ad Solutions CMO Tony Marlow explains how OEMs like LG benefit from controlling the “glass” (the TV screen) and how that allows them to monitor and control frequency across both linear and streaming, a key issue for advertisers as they make the move to CTV.
TONY MARLOW: When you're talking about a massive OEM with a massive global footprint, it gives you scaled first-party inventory and data all from the same provider. It gives you control over the environment for things like suitability or fraud mitigation, and it gives you access to custom creative solutions.
So for us, we offer creatives that are native to the home screen as well as traditional video ads. So basically, the ability to have campaigns that span both CTV video and that native inventory. So those things - and then I guess I would also say the scale and diversity of the audience are pretty critical elements to this.
We're talking north of 130 million TVs worldwide. This is essentially deduplicated scale that you might not get if you were operating with several apps independently, where they can only see within a sliver of the ecosystem.
I know I said it at the top of the question, but you've got a lot of sophisticated marketers that are really asking themselves right now, "How do I do CTV well?" And I would posit that having a direct-to-glass strategy is going to be one critical part of doing that.
With ACR, we can truly measure and control frequency, not just across a variety of CTV environments, but actually across both linear and CTV.
So understanding what's hitting the glass, whether it's linear or CTV, helps you control frequency, and it helps you have an understanding of what has the screen seen. And then you start to get into content genres and things like that.
If you lack the holistic understanding of that user experience, what have they seen? Have they seen this ad too many times? What kinds of content do they engage with? It becomes difficult to make a meaningful connection with them.
That's where we view LG Ads as having a distinctive advantage over other solutions in the market because we can see those things and we can deliver a meaningful connection.