← Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:00]
Ari Paparo
Foreign welcome to the Market Podcast. This is Ari Poparo. We're broadcasting from Cannes. All week we're going to be publishing short interviews with interesting people here at Cannes. We hope you enjoy it and we'll be back next week with a can wrap up in our normal format. Welcome to the Market Tecture Podcast. This is Ari Paparo. I'm here in Cannes and I have the pleasure of speaking with Tony Marlow, who is the CMO of LG Ad Solutions. Tony, thanks for being here.
- [00:35]
Tony Marlow
Hey, Ari, thank you so much for having us. You're really excited to chat.
- [00:38]
Ari Paparo
The LG suite is pretty nice. You've got chips. I've been offered coffee. We have a private room to record. Is this how you always roll?
- [00:45]
Tony Marlow
You know you can never have enough caffeine at these things, right? I think half of the industry is here. At least half of them are jet lag. Coffee is a must. So lots of coffee here for everyone.
- [00:56]
Ari Paparo
All right, so let's just get started with the basics. What's the latest on lg? Everyone knows your devices, you probably have some in your living room. Big ad business, I believe, mobile as well as tv. So just give me, give me the latest and greatest.
- [01:10]
Tony Marlow
Yeah, well, for anyone who's listening who might not be familiar with us, at a basic level, we have the footprint of about 200 million LG TVs worldwide, about 45 million of them in the US and, and we are able to help facilitate advertising moments on them. So whether that's directly on the home screen, which we'll call home screen, or premium CTV native units, or within our own fast service LG channel. So in the US, for example, there's somewhere north of 350 channels, it's all free, it's all available via streaming and it's ad supported. So that's what we do. And in terms of what's the latest, I would say some of the ad innovation, you know, meaning shoppable ad units, ad units that are, that are, have advanced formats, additional functionality that you traditionally didn't see in linear version of television ads. Even our 3D AD units seem to be gaining a lot of traction where when you turn your TV on and you're at the home screen, you're in this moment of choice trying to discover what your content is. And there's an ad unit that just appears to extend beyond the boundaries of its, of the unit slot. It's just something that's really engaging, particularly while someone's in discovery mode. So we've been talking a lot about the Innovation there. And then of course there's the creative side of it. So we've been talking about the art and science of ctv. So that's a little bit of the art. And then on the science side it's about making sure those ads hit the right people. And so we're here on the ground talking about the art and science of connected tv. And I guess the only other thing I would say is, is it's interesting. Connected TV is sight, sound and motion that we've always loved about tv. But it's also the addressability that we love about digital channels. And I think while that's, that's been true for a while, I think everyone's starting to recognize that now.
- [02:56]
Ari Paparo
Right, okay. That's a lot to think about. 3D ads, I just want to, I want to dive on that. You can't, you can't dangle that in front of me. You go into a marketer or an agency and say, Hey, 3D ads. And their interaction is like, that's so cool. And how do I build that? And so just in general, like how do you scale innovation in when you know, people want to be on the bleeding edge, but it's just not going to reach that many people.
- [03:18]
Tony Marlow
So firstly that the inventory is there, the availables. But you're right in terms of the creative requirements, we have our own in house design team. We help our clients build those ad units. For example, we recently did one with a famous perfume brand. The perfume bottle sort of pops out from the screen. And just to be clear, obviously this is an audio format. We're not, we don't have the visuals. We're not talking about the red and blue glasses that you used to get while watching. We're talking about a unit that just seems to extend beyond its boundaries and it's a really cool innovation. We recently, in new fronts, we found that there was a lot of interest to get it against it and it's really about the creative execution of it. That's a bit of a challenge, which is why we take the lead on that typically. But the scale is there.
- [03:58]
Ari Paparo
And do advertisers think about all glass the same or are they, do you have to convince them like, hey, I'm doing this 3D units, great, blah blah, blah. I but I want it both on the TV and the handheld or the handheld device or are they still in silos?
- [04:12]
Tony Marlow
That's an interesting question because I'd say Even within connected TV environments there are other OEMs. Right. We're not operating in a vacuum you know, pretending that doesn't exist. And Even between those OEMs, the units are not exactly the same. So I think luckily though, so that that is true, but luckily there's not that many. If you work with us and one other OEM that's about half of the US market. At a third one in there, you're starting to wedge closer to 3/4 of the market. So luckily there's not a lot of players when it comes to cross device. Those innovative units do tend to live within the connected TV environment because it is such a unique format. You're talking about the largest screen in the home. You're talking about, as we were saying before the sight sounded motion of television with the data supply by all of our data sources. Mobile is a little bit of a different beast. The Canvas is a smaller size, it's much more personal device. We do cross screen campaigns across device, you know, other devices such as mobiles or tablets within an LG household. But the units aren't always exactly the same ad style.
- [05:13]
Ari Paparo
Right, that makes sense. Now you, you mentioned other OEMs, so that sort of begs the question, do advertisers think of the OEM cohort as a channel separate from the broadcaster channel or the other kind of sub segments within ctv? Do people say I want to buy Vizio plus competitor X and Y or is it just media and everyone's competing for everything?
- [05:34]
Tony Marlow
It's interesting. I'm not sure I've seen a consistent answer to this. So I think there is. And you and you use the word cohort, which I think is appropriate because I don't think of the other players as necessarily direct competitors. The duplicated reach is extremely low. So you're talking single digit percent duplicated reach. And think of it like this, especially the main TV within the household, you have an LG on the wall or it's a different brand. You're not, you're typically, it would be very unusual for you to have more than one, although I'm sure it occurs. But it means that when you're reaching the LG audience, they're different to OEM A or OEM B or oemc. So like I think the way that makes most sense to look at it is the term we use is going direct to glass as opposed to a myriad of these OTT players where you might have 15, 20 different players. And it starts to become really challenging to control things like frequency, which is obviously poor experience for a marketer. It's wastage poor experience for the user. If you see too Many ads in too short a period of time for the same brand. So I love that you said cohort. They're not necessarily direct competitors, although obviously we believe we have unique advantages. But it's such a unique space. It's going direct to Glass.
- [06:45]
Ari Paparo
I wouldn't normally ask you about a competitor, but there's one that sticks out. I just love to get your hot take. What do you think of telly, the free tv?
- [06:52]
Tony Marlow
I don't know. It's interesting. Like, for me, I won't speak directly about them, but I will say the concept that they've taken to market, there's something interesting about it, right? There's something interesting about saying, well, we're not trying to monetize the hardware. What we're trying to monetize is the platform and the ad experience. And I do think there's something to that. Again, like, not necessarily speaking directly about their company, but I think that there's a world where subsidizing the hardware using. Using advertising makes sense. Now, should that number be zero? I think probably not. Like, think about distribution. Like, why would a Best Buy, why, why would Amazon carry a $0 product when there's no margin in it for them? So I think distribution becomes a tremendous problem at a $0 product. But if we talk about the concept of significantly subsidized, there's something interesting in that. And it also gives people choice. If you want a really inexpensive hardware option, they've got the choice for that if they want to pay a little bit more and have a premium experience. I think for us at the moment, though, like, this is not really a game that we're directly in. For us, it is about building these beautiful televisions, these beautiful experiences, and the beautiful advertising opportunities that go along with it.
- [08:05]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, the TVs essentially already are subsidized to some extent, but I wouldn't want to be the executive that had to go to Korea and try to tell them the TVs were going to be free. So let's talk about Cannes. So the theme, I think, think at Cannes is very obvious this year, which is AI. I just heard two guys on the street say that next year no one's coming to Cannes. They're just going to send their agent agents to talk to each other. It's day one. So what are, what are you hearing?
- [08:32]
Tony Marlow
It's funny and so your listeners won't know this, but yesterday we just. Ari and I just happened to be walking down the street near each other. We had a chat. So I'm absolutely going to steal something that you said to me. But you were saying to me that you think that this is going to be the agentic AI. Well, that will be the topic that's hot here. And I have to say here on day one Monday of Cannes, I think it's true. I think the conversation in the past, even 12 months ago, I think AI was more of a buzzword without a lot of wood behind the arrow. People were talking about it, but there weren't a lot of practical use cases. I think now you're starting to talk about AI for purposes of creative generation, making the ad units themselves or making variants so you can ab test a large number of ads. I think you're starting to talk about AI agents that do things like creating targetable segments and maybe even targetable segments that the human mind doesn't understand in terms of age and gender. It's much more sophisticated than that. And I think we're heading down the path where there will be a marketplace for these AI agents that do things like control your media plan. If you're an agency, we'll extend your team and extend the superpower of all those humans that are already doing this, this stuff, but make it much more granular and targetable. So I think that's a hot topic right here, right now.
- [09:46]
Ari Paparo
And our clients coming to you and saying, what are you doing with these AI agents to help us, like the targeting example and. Or are they saying, just give us all the raw data and inventory, we're going to do it?
- [09:57]
Tony Marlow
Yeah, I think there's a lot of questioning around how can AI generally help us. And it does tend to be in those two areas. We were talking about the art and science of tv. We actually use AI, so our home screen units are not IAB standard. And so we use that to take units from other parts of a media plan and make them fit the canvas. And it's incredible. I'm actually astounded at how often it needs either little or no human additional effort to sort of make it fit that canvas. So on the creative side, we're already using it. You may have seen we made a few recent announcements over recent months. You know, for example, with Zen apps where we're using AI segments, so we're starting to get into that game as well and the clients do expect it. I think everyone understands this is coming down at a pace we've never seen before. So if you and I are having this conversation in one year time, I think it will be. Our agents will be numerous in nature. I think there'll be so many will be hard to talk about and it's happening at that kind of trajectory.
- [10:57]
Ari Paparo
I didn't see that announcement or I don't remember. Tell me, walk me through the that example of targeting. So you're using a third party vendor to create these non human understandable targets. Is that what it is?
- [11:07]
Tony Marlow
Yeah. So that and we actually have a few AI things going on but that particular one with Zen apps, it's around emotions and mindset. So what it is is taking some of our ACR data, some other data points and just saying this is the likely emotional mindset of this person when they're watching certain types of content and creating targetable segments in that way. Now I would say I think it's early innings. I think right now as an AI quote unquote industry, I think we're crawling but the speed that we were talking about before, it'll almost be like crawl run as opposed to crawl walk run. But it is very early inning. So I think we're starting to test it with that. Also other, you know, we had a recent announcement with Nexon for example as well. Really pushing those AI stories out there. So it is something that's helping on both the art and the science.
- [11:56]
Ari Paparo
So over dinner last night, a fellow I know on the sell side was very concerned about AI. He thought that agentic and all this other stuff was going to actually consolidate spend that agencies were going to buy on fewer partners. I didn't really follow that logic exactly because it seems as though if the AI is doing it, you can go on more publishers. Wonder if you had a hot take on that question.
- [12:19]
Tony Marlow
I agree with your take. I think that AI has the capability to do things at scale that humans can't. And it's almost like being able to see the forest and the trees at the same time. And I think most humans either are either sort of in one mode or another. I think it is able to get into maybe granular areas or maybe places of not large scale, but cobble enough of them together to form a long tail that we won't. So I think that will. My guess is if you're in a media planning agency, your human team will have an AI team that help them consolidate these nooks and crannies of highly desirable content that may not have its enough scale on its own. I suspect that's where it's going.
- [12:59]
Ari Paparo
So all this cutting edge AI stuff is great, but by far the hottest thing in the CTV industry is pause ads. Why are pause ads so hot? It's like 2025 is the year of pause ads.
- [13:12]
Tony Marlow
Well I can't argue with that. I mean obviously we have pause ads. People like the pause ads. I think firstly I think just being able to have a complete canvas takeover, I think they like that it's and for many brands like you look at the luxury space, for example, they love a canvas where they can tell a rich, beautiful story. And I think there's something about the pause ad that just affords someone the whole screen. But you're right, it's having its moment in the sun. I think some of it is around that canvas impact and some of it is just a little bit of going with the flow maybe.
- [13:42]
Ari Paparo
All right. On that note, Tony Marlowe from LG Ad Solutions, thank you so much for being here.
- [13:46]
Tony Marlow
Really appreciate it. I hope you have a fantastic camp.
- [13:50]
Ari Paparo
Thank you for subscribing to market. New interviews are added every week at Marketing and your favorite podcasting app.
- [13:59]
Tony Marlow
Sam.