The Home Screen is Where the Heart Is, New LG Report Says
“LG Ad Solutions’ Home Screen offering represents a premium entry point for brands to build meaningful, measurable connections with viewers," said Mike Laband of Magnite
With more viewing going to streaming, the simple act of watching TV has become more complicated. Once upon a time, a viewer turned on the TV and content began to play, usually starting with whatever channel was watched last.
If you fell asleep to the watching Johnnie Carson (or Jay Leno or Jimmy Fallon, depending on your demo) you woke up to the Today show.
Today many viewers are using connected TV and when they turn on the set they often get the home screen of their equipment provider, whether a streaming device maker like Roku or Amazon, or a TV set maker like LG, Samsung or Vizio. That home screen is accumulating watch time, making it increasingly valuable real estate.
Home screen ads are becoming hot properties and ad tech companies are falling over themselves to make those home screen ads contextually relevant and available programmatically to make them more attractive to advertisers.
LG Advertising says it has seen a more than 60% year-over-year increase in general-market advertisers integrating home screen ads into their campaigns.
“As the streaming advertising industry continues to evolve beyond traditional ad breaks, we’ve seen a growing advertiser demand for ways to connect with audiences at the very beginning of the viewing journey, where intent and attention are at their peak,” said Mike Laband, group senior VP, US revenue at Magnite. “LG Ad Solutions’ Home Screen offering represents a premium entry point for brands to build meaningful, measurable connections with viewers.”
A new report from LG Ad Solutions calls the home screen the first impression for viewers and advertisers.
LG looked at 120 million home screen impressions and found that interactive features deliver 3.9 times higher awareness and boost brand consideration by 3.8 times. Calls to action placed on the right third of the screen lift purchase intent by 15 times.
Viewers spend an average of almost 10 minutes browsing before deciding what to watch and a lot of that time is spent on that home screen. LG found that 71% of the people who see a home screen ad say they’re willing to learn more about the advertised brand and more than half of LG TV users report paying attention to home screen ads.
Home advantage of home screen ads is that they don’t break into programming. They appear while viewers are engaged with the TV, but not with a particular story.
“If you think about how people actually use their TVs today, everything starts on the Home Screen,” said Tony Marlow, CMO at LG Ad Solutions. “It’s the heartbeat of CTV — the one place that connects every part of the viewing journey, from live and on-demand to apps and discovery. For advertisers, it’s no longer just another placement; it’s the anchor that ties their entire strategy together.”
Nearly all LG Smart TV users start their viewing session on the home screen, visiting on average three times a day. Research from LG Ad Solutions and MediaScience shows that campaigns integrating CTV video, home screen, and mobile video deliver 4.7 times higher awareness, 8.7 times stronger recall, and 11.2 times greater consideration than single-channel efforts.
"The LG Ad Solutions native home screen has become a key awareness strategy for driving impact at scale. We get high attention and resonance as the first brand a user sees when they turn on their TV, strong brand lift metrics and incremental reach to hard-to-find SVOD-only audiences,” said Doug Paladino, senior director at media agency PMG.
LG points to studies that have found that viewers spend seven seconds of attentive viewing time on home screen ads, which is more than any skippable pre-roll format. Also that home screen ads score 16% higher attention retention and 85% of viewers describe home screen ads as clear, informative and brand building.
“We’ve used the LG home screen to effectively extend our reach and create brand awareness and favorability,” said Steve Hartmann, head of integrated marketing at Experian. “As the first brand a viewer sees when they turn on their TV, these placements consistently drove a significant lift in ad recall while reaching millions of incremental households for a recent campaign.”
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Kiswe said it introduced Kiswe Core, a new product that offers enhanced cloud-based production tools and direct-to-consumer streaming delivery on any screen over any platform.
“Every stream. Every platform. Every time. That is what Kiswe Core stands for,” said Glenn Booth, CEO of Kiswe. “It brings the precision of broadcast together with the scalability of the cloud, giving our partners total control over their media distribution and the confidence to deliver perfect streams anywhere.”
The Kiswe direct-to-consumer products are now part of Kiswe Connect, an end-to-end solution for production and distribution of streaming content.
“Kiswe Connect continues to empower sports teams, leagues, artists, and creators to take control of their brand and business through fully branded D2C platforms and events,” said Booth. “Together, Kiswe Connect and Kiswe Core make Kiswe the global leader in streaming technology and services, providing customers a flexible and reliable way to deliver content anywhere.”