Alphonso Rebrands as LG Ads, Creates Connected TV Media and Measurement Platform

TV data and measurement company Alphonso is rebranding to LG Ads as part of the smart TV maker’s efforts to scale up its advertising business. The new platform is the exclusive provider of LG’s connected TV ad inventory, alongside data for activation, measurement and attribution across CTV, linear TV and digital. LG, which invested approximately $80 million in Alphonso in January to acquire a roughly 60% stake in the company, has the second-largest household footprint in the U.S., behind Samsung. The new platform's data will only be available through LG Ads. “What we're doing here is essentially bringing an LG ads platform into market, similar to the likes of Roku or Samsung,” Raghu Kodige, chief product officer and co-founder of Alphonso, told Adweek. He said the goal of the product is to help advertisers reach a premium, unique audience through a single platform, rather than finding inventory and data through multiple players, as it has done in the past. All of the LG CTV inventory, including display inventory and video inventory through the TV manufacturer’s ad-supported, in-house content offering, called LG Channels, will be part of the LG Ads platform. Brands and agencies will be able to buy directly from the LG Ads team, which Kodige described as a “simplified” process. The platform combines CTV inventory from 20 million smart TVs in the U.S. with combined cross-screen targeting data from eight different smart TV and connected TV device brands. LG Ads' footprint will be further expanded, as it will also provide data from Alphonso legacy partners Sharp, Toshiba, Hisense, Tivo and Sling Media, as well as Seiki and Skyworth. Kodige said that while it will not necessarily bring any first-party CTV inventory from those platforms, buying data from CTV inventory on those platforms can be utilized through LG Ads. “The analytics obviously is very helpful having diversity in brands,” said Kodige. One of the most frequent questions from agencies is if there is any bias in Alphonso’s data. “When they work with a single source, someone like Samsung or Inscape, it’s just one single brand. What makes the LG Ads platform attractive is it has multiple brands in it. There is more diversity and more uniform representation of the actual population behavior than there is with just a single brand of TV that they're working with.” LG Ads will add an additional 10 to 15 new brands throughout the year. “Having this wide representation across various TV models and each of them bringing additional scale, I think is going to be the main differentiator, and the analytics functionality that we are known for,” said Kodige. Alphonso was previously known in the marketplace for using LG's data to run retargeting campaigns and providing attribution for TV and local broadcasters. With newly minted LG Ads in-house, all functionality and products will be folded into the platform. “It's one place for a brand to come and understand how linear TV is working, plan with us on how they extend the reach of our audience into the connected TV environment, and buy that connected TV audience and get the full report on how well their campaigns are performing,” said Kodige. By putting LG in the platform's name, the company hopes to signify to brands and agency partners that they are “buying an equivalent of a Roku or a Samsung in the market,” said Kodige. “With LG Ads, it's a cleaner way of representing that, and the focus is going to be very much on the CTV space. Whereas in the past, Alphonso was doing retargeting attribution, a whole bunch of things.” Creating 'stickiness' with consumers The data will help LG enrich its consumer services for its in-house streaming service LG Channels, including improved content recommendations to create an owned and operated first-screen, cross-device advertising platform with integrated analytics. It will also improve personalized recommendations, advanced search and discovery and advanced smart TV features to help LG “create stickiness” with consumers. “Being part of the LG family puts us even closer to the consumer," Alphonso CMO Allen Bush said. “LG being such a big consumer entertainment brand, it puts us much closer to the consumer and gives us the ability to build out the services that we provide back to consumers in exchange for the data." LG has lagged behind competitors Vizio and Samsung in its streaming ads business. Earlier this month, the company named SpotX the primary global supply-side platform for LG Electronics. The two first joined in the third quarter of 2020. Alphonso’s rebrand to LG Ads comes as the smart TV landscape works to boost its ad businesses as streaming continues to explode. Samsung, the world’s top-selling TV manufacturer, built its own DSP and rolled out a new measurement offering. Vizio brought its data company Inscape in-house. “If you’re reaching a Samsung household or reaching LG household, more often than not it’s additive,” Seth Walters, head of smart TV advertising for LG, told Adweek last month. “And I think that advertisers have begun to recognize that, and realize that in order to effectively accumulate reach across the [over-the-top] landscape, they need to work with smart TV properties, like LG, and buy from them directly in order to best accumulate reach across their footprint.”