How Guaranteed Business Outcomes Are Helping LG Ads Solutions Make Its Mark
The following interview is an excerpt from our newest Special Report: Proving The Point: Case Studies That Prove The Power Of The New Smart TV Ecosystem.
“We are fairly new to this market, some of our competitors have a four year head start on us. But we know our product is amazing and that we can live up to the promises we’re making,” Serge Matta, President of LG Ads Solutions, explained, as he laid out LG’s recent decision to offer a guarantee of 100% delivery and 100% completion. “It’s been a good way to get brands and agencies to take a chance on the new guys, to understand what LG can offer them.”
ALAN WOLK (AW): What are the key reasons an advertiser would work with LG Ads Solutions?
SERGE MATTA (SM): There are several reasons. The first and most important is incremental reach—getting your ads in front of all those people you are missing on linear. And it’s not as if all of those people are cord cutters either, they are more likely to be light linear viewers.
And if they have an LG TV and they’re doing most of their viewing on that LG TV, then we can help your brand reach them.
That brings us to the second reason, which is our ACR data. Our ACR captures what opted-in viewers have seen on both linear and streaming. So we can then use that data to identify those viewers you are missing on linear and then allow you to target them. It’s much more granular than what many brands are used to getting with TV and that is a very powerful argument right there.
The third reason a brand would want to work with LG Ads Solutions is that we are global. I can’t stress that enough—globally we are around 140 million TVs. We already launched our ACR data in the US, Canada and Korea and we're going to be launching ACR in around a dozen more countries this fall. We have native display and video ad units today in 100 plus countries.
AW: How does LG being global impact advertisers?
SM: LG truly is a global brand —our biggest market outside of the U.S. and Canada is actually Brazil. So if you are a global company or have global interests, we can help you to reach your target wherever they are.
I’ll give you an example: someone called me today to ask whether we can also run their campaign in Kenya. And we went in and we looked and it turns out we can. We are running active campaigns in 78 different countries.
So many brands today are multinational, they’re not just looking at the U.S. market. And we can provide them with both advertising and measurement along with a sizable audience. That’s going to be an even more critical feature in the years to come.
AW: Tell me about your performance outcome-based offerings. How does that work?
SM: There's a lot of noise around CTV and brands have a lot of options as to who they can work with. We looked at our own offering and thought “Yes, we own the screen. Yes, we have exclusive content with LG Channels and you can’t reach those viewers anywhere else. So there is all of that. But what else can we do?”
So we decided that we were going to take an extra step. And that extra step is we're going to take off all the risk. We will guarantee 100% delivery on all of your demos— age, gender, income education, presence of children—and that delivery will be verified by an independent third party that's MRC accredited, someone like Experian or TransUnion. We will do incremental reach and frequency as measured by iSpot.
For clients in the media and entertainment space, we even offer guaranteed app installs. We tell them, do not pay us until an install happens. And then we agree on the cost per install, and not as measured by LG, but as measured by a company like Kochava, Appsflyer or Adjust.
We even offer a guaranteed 100% video completion rate on our ads as measured by Google or Innovid or any other MRC accredited company.
So you can see why we think this is such a big deal and a great deal for our clients as well.
AW: Let’s talk a little about the case study where you helped a retailer increase foot traffic from parents and teachers during a back-to-school event. How did that work?
SM: We have two different ways we can help brands find their target audiences. We can look at leveraging our ACR data and bucket those viewers into specific audience segments based on the content they’re watching. So if somebody is a heavy NFL viewer—they're watching Thursday Night Football, they’re watching all day Sunday and then they’re watching Monday Night Football too, well, we can easily put them in an NFL enthusiast bucket based on how much NFL content they're viewing. So that's one way of doing it and in the back-to-school example we would have looked to see if they were watching shows that lined up with the demos the client was trying to reach.
The other way that we tackled that was by supplementing their existing linear viewing, and creating incremental reach. The advantage of CTV is we're not relying on a cookie, so this is all based on a CTV ID, coupled with the IP address. That allows us to easily match up with third party audiences at third party databases. So we can match our data to LiveRamp, TransUnion, Experian, Epsilon and similar companies’ data where we can then overlay additional finite segments.
That is key because we can only learn certain things about viewers by examining their viewing patterns— for instance, I won’t know that they recently went to Cancun on a vacation. But I can overlay one set of data onto the other in order to get a better profile of who that customer is and whether they are in the right bucket.
The final piece is that we are creating something called the Household Graph. So long as you have an LG device in your household, you are part of an LG household and then we can build a graph of those households and a DSP can use that to serve up ads to that household, and not necessarily on an LG device either.
One other key point with the Household Graph is that we're still using our TV audience data and ad exposure data to target those viewers and to manage household frequency. That’s critical because as you know, over frequency—seeing the same ads over and over—is a huge problem for CTV and as an OEM, we can help brands to avoid that. And to go back to your first question, that is definitely a key reason an advertiser would want to work with LG—reducing or eliminating overfrequency.
