LG TVs will soon leverage an artificial intelligence model built for showing advertisements that more closely align with viewers' personal beliefs and emotions.
The company plans to incorporate a partner company’s AI tech into its TV software in order to interpret psychological factors impacting a viewer, such as personal interests, personality traits, and lifestyle choices. The aim is to show LG webOS users ads that will emotionally impact them.
The upcoming advertising approach comes via a multiyear licensing deal with Zenapse, a company that describes itself as a software-as-a-service marketing platform that can drive advertiser sales “with AI-powered emotional intelligence.” LG will use Zenapse’s technology to divide webOS users into hyper-specific market segments that are supposed to be more informative to advertisers. LG Ad Solutions, LG’s advertising business, announced the partnership on Tuesday.
The technology will be used to inform ads shown on LG smart TVs’ home screens, free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels, and elsewhere throughout webOS, per StreamTV Insider. LG will also use Zenapse's tech to “expand new software development and go-to-market products," it said. LG didn’t specify the duration of its licensing deal with Zenapse.
Zenapse’s platform for connected TVs (CTVs), ZenVision, is supposed to be able to interpret the types of emotions shown in the content someone is watching on TV, partially by using publicly available information about the show's or movie’s script and plot, StreamTV Insider reported. ZenVision also analyzes viewer behavior, grouping viewers based on their consumption patterns, the publication noted. Under the new partnership, ZenVision can use data that LG has gathered from the automatic content recognition software in LG TVs.
With all this information, ZenVision will group LG TV viewers into highly specified market segments, such as “goal-driven achievers,” “social connectors,” or "emotionally engaged planners," an LG spokesperson told StreamTV Insider. Zenapse's website for ZenVision points to other potential market segments, including "digital adopters," "wellness seekers," "positive impact & environment," and "money matters."
Companies paying to advertise on LG TVs can then target viewers based on the ZenVision-specified market segments and deliver an “emotionally intelligent ad,” as Zenapse’s website puts it.
This type of targeted advertising aims to bring advertisers more in-depth information about TV viewers than demographic data or even contextual advertising (which shows ads based on what the viewer is watching) via psychographic data. Demographic data gives advertisers viewer information, like location, age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, and income. Psychographic data is supposed to go deeper and allow advertisers to target people based on so-called psychological factors, like personal beliefs, values, and attitudes. As Salesforce explains, “psychographic segmentation delves deeper into their psyche” than relying on demographic data.
“As viewers engage with content, ZenVision's understanding of a consumer grows deeper, and our... segmentation continually evolves to optimize predictions,” the ZenVision website says.
Getting Emotional
LG’s partnership with Zenapse comes as advertisers struggle to appeal to TV viewers’ emotions. Google, for example, attempted to tug at parents’ heartstrings with the now-infamous Dear Sydney ad aired during the 2024 Summer Olympics. Looking to push Gemini, Google hit all the wrong chords with parents, and, after much backlash, pulled the ad.
The partnership also comes as TV OS operators seek new ways to use smart TVs to grow their own advertising businesses and to get people to use TVs to buy stuff.
With their ability to track TV viewers' behavior, including what they watch and search for on their TVs, smart TVs are a growing obsession for advertisers. As LG's announcement pointed out, CTVs represent "one of the fastest-growing ad segments in the US, expected to reach over $40 billion by 2027, up from $24.6 billion in 2023."
However, as advertisers' interest in appealing to streamers grows, so do their efforts to track and understand viewers for more targeted advertising. Both efforts could end up pushing the limits of user comfort and privacy.
LG is one of the biggest global TV brands, so its plan to distribute emotionally driven ads to the 200 million LG TVs currently in people's homes could have a ripple effect. Further illustrating the dominance of LG TVs, webOS is estimated to be in 35 percent of US homes, per data that Hub Entertainment Research shared this week. As such, LG's foray into advertising driven by AI’s ability to understand and appeal to viewer emotions could lead to other CTV OSes following suit.
For its part, LG thinks it can use Zenapse's tech to make "future innovations that could shape new emotionally intelligent experiences for the TV screen," a spokesperson told StreamTV Insider.
As it stands, targeted ads are a divisive approach to what we might consider a necessary evil: advertising. While targeted ads rely on tracking techniques that many find invasive, they could also result in ads that are more relevant and less annoying to the people seeing them. In cases where advertising is inevitable, some prefer ads that appeal on a personal level over messaging that can be inappropriate or, even, disturbing and offensive.
At this stage, we don’t know how the ads shown on LG’s webOS might evolve with Zenapse’s technology. But it seems like LG and, likely, other smart TV OS operators will try to strengthen their abilities to understand your convictions, beliefs, and values.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.