LG has started testing displaying ads on its TVs, and yeah, this includes the expensive OLED models as well.
The company’s advertising unit, LG Ad Solutions, showed off a new full screen ad unit earlier this year that pops up when the TV is in standby mode. More recently, the TV review blog Flat Panels HD has tested out the high-end LG G4 OLED and discovered that units shipping to people’s home show fullscreen display ads before the screensaver kicks on. As of the time of writing, we have no confirmation of this service being pushed in Canada yet.
The ad they saw was for LG’s free FAST channel service ‘LG Channels,’ but the examples shown off earlier this year appear to be for third-party things like cars and more. The publication also mentions that the ad they saw was muted, but it’s unclear if that will be the case for all ads.
In a press release from LG Ad Solutions on September 5th, the company appears quite proud of its ‘Native screensaver ads’ that can appear across the LG home screen, Channels app, and content store on LG televisions. In the press release, Chris Weiland, Director of Product Marketing at LG Ad Solutions says, “The launch of our Screensaver Ads has been a significant milestone in enhancing viewer engagement on LG Smart TVs. This full-screen ad format has effectively utilized idle screen time to boost brand visibility. Feedback and study results have validated that these ads capture attention and drive meaningful interactions, making them an integral part of our ad offerings.”
You can read the full press release here, but what I find funny is that LG has apparently conducted studies on this ad format, and is acting like they’re pioneering a tech that’s been used across cheap low-end TVs for years. It’s not a good look for a company typically known for offering high-end products.
That being said, unless you opted to buy an LG OLED TV, your screensaver options on LG televisions have been cheap feeling for years. Personally, I often recommend to my friends to buy LG TVs because I trust the company’s colour accuracy, and I find Samsung is often too magenta. That said, my friends finally took my tech advice and bought an LG NanoCell LED TV, and while it’s great, to me, it doesn’t live up to its $1,400 price tag. The backlighting is pretty harsh (don’t tell them I’ve been secretly reviewing their TV, they don’t notice these things), and the screensaver is a joke. Unlike OLED TVs where LG has an art store where you can buy pictures to use as screensavers, the NanoCell line just gets, I believe, four stock images. One is a beach in French Polynesia, one is an old building in Austria, and one is a German bridge. I can’t remember the final one but it also screams “basic stock image” to me every time I see it. One day I tried to load more pictures onto the TV since we found the stock images in the ‘Sample’ section of the TV’s file management app, but there was no way to make that work and we ended up deleting the beach image so now they only have three screensaver images.
It really seems like most people don’t care that much about their screensavers, but it just feels incredibly backwards to me for LG to offer an art store on it’s OLED TVs, but it considers its other models too cheap to have access. I mean in today’s age, $1,400 isn’t a cheap TV and loading it with software you’d expect to see on a low-end laptop from 2003 feels like the company just doesn’t care, which to me isn’t a great look and would force me to buy an Apple TV since Apple has the best screen savers by a huge margin. Google/Android TV can also have fun options and I really like being able to use my own photos or cool satellite images from Maps. However, the Google TV is also pushing ads on its home screen, which I’m obviously not a fan of.
The ads aren’t even good either. The other day I had one for the McDonalds smore McFlurry and the button said ‘Order Now.’ My girlfriend and I were curious, so we clicked on it expecting the ad to backdoor through Uber Eats or Doordash to let us quickly order the McFlurry, but instead, it opened YouTube and just played a McDonald’s commercial. Great stuff, and honestly annoyed me with the misdirection more than it made me want to get off my couch and go to McDonalds down the street.
After all this, you may be wondering why my headline says LG has dropped to my least favourite brand. Basically, it’s TVs are expensive and I didn’t mind paying that in the past to get a premium experience, but if I’m going to pay that much for a TV for it to still be full of ads and junky software, the value disappears and if the value is gone, why not just buy a cheaper TV and a nicer set-top box.
Source: LG Ad Solutions, Flat Panels HD
Image source: Flat Panels HD
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