• by Wayne Friedman , March 1, 2021

Taking advantage of its new majority-stake ownership by TV set manufacturer LG Electronics, TV and media measurement company Alphonso is being rebranded as LG Ads.

LG Ads will offer connected TV ad inventory on its smart TV platform -- as well as TV data for activation, measurement and attribution across CTV, linear TV and digital -- on 20 million U.S. smart TV and connected TV devices.

Overall, on a worldwide basis, LG's smart TV footprint is more than 120 million TV sets.

Current TV set manufacturing partners for LG Ads include LG, Sharp, Hisense, Toshiba, Seiki, Skyworth, Tivo and Sling Media. The company says there are other original TV equipment makers committed to using LG Ads this year.

In addition to exclusive access to connected TV inventory, LG Ads says it will continue to focus on media planners' efforts to improve reach on linear TV buys, as well as insights into hard-to-reach audiences in using connected TV advertising.

In early January, LG Electronics took a more than 50% controlling stake in Alphonso though an $80 million investment. This was Alphonso’s first investment round since its Series A financing of $5.6 million in 2017, led by Manifest Investment Partners.

Competing smart TV manufacturer Samsung has already had its Samsung Ads advanced TV advertising in operation for a number of years.

Samsung says it reaches more than 60% of the U.S.’s ACR (automated content recognition) smart TVs and other devices across some 50 million U.S. TV households.

In September 2020, Samsung Ads -- the advanced TV advertising unit of the TV set manufacturer -- launched Samsung DSP, a self-serve demand-side platform.

In December 2019, Vizio launched its own advertising sales division built on its Vizio Inscape data unit, allowing brands to manage reach and frequency and deduplicate audiences across OTT and linear buys.