LG: Smart TVs to monitor viewers' emotions and evaluate them using AI

LG, one of the world's largest manufacturers of smart TVs, wants to better understand the personal convictions, beliefs, values and emotions of viewers and turn these insights into cash with the help of personalized advertising. The South Korean company has signed a multi-year license agreement with Zenapse via its advertising subsidiary LG Ad Solutions. This US-based supplier describes itself as a software-as-a-service marketing platform that aims to increase advertisers' sales "with AI-supported emotional intelligence" and "psychographic targeting".

The collaboration will drive the development of new advertising products based on the Zenapse platform for connected TV (CTV), the two companies announced this week. Connected TV allows content to be transmitted via streaming services, internet browsers and social media. The new technology for targeted advertising will soon offer "more meaningful and measurable brand experiences on over 200 million LG Smart TVs worldwide".

The combination of Zenapse's AI capabilities and psychographic data "with our proprietary technology is a win-win situation," said David Rudnick, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at LG Ad Solutions. This will improve the ability to "understand content, drive personalization and improve targeting". Ultimately, this approach will help advertisers "build a closer connection with viewers, maximize campaign performance and increase ad relevance in connected environments".

Psychological factors play a key role

The envisaged technology is intended to differ from other forms of personalized advertising in the smart TV sector such as contextual targeting, which is based on matching with themes or other content-based aspects. LG and Zenapse want to focus on creating and delivering targeted, emotionally engaging advertising messages based on individuals' overall mindsets, values and motivations –, not just what they are watching. Beyond widely available demographic data such as location, age, gender, ethnicity, marital status and income, psychological factors should play a key role.

Zenapse's advertising solution ZenVision is marketed with the feature of being able to interpret the type of emotions expressed in the content viewed, explains the StreamTV Insider portal. To do this, the company evaluates publicly available information about the script and the plot of the program or film. ZenVision also analyzes viewer behavior and divides the audience into various target groups based on their consumption patterns, such as "determined achievers", "social networkers" or "emotionally engaged planners". Zenapse cites other potential market segments such as "digital adopters", "wellness seekers", "positive impact and environment" and "money matters".

As part of the new partnership, ZenVision can now also use data that LG has collected with the automatic content recognition software on its networked televisions, according to the report. Behind this is Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which researchers drew attention to in October. The technology makes use of the fact that smart TVs regularly create hashes from the visible and sometimes audible content. These "fingerprints" are uploaded in encrypted form to the manufacturer's clouds and compared on the server side with a database of primarily films, series and games. In the event of a match, the manufacturer knows what the user is currently watching or playing. This allows them to generate comprehensive profiles and serve advertising to match, which also enables "HDMI espionage".

Large Emotion Model decodes the viewer

According to Zenapse, it has also developed a proprietary Large Emotion Model (LEM) to refine these mechanisms for generating the transparent viewer. This should work in a similar way to a Large Language Model (LLM), which drives generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. In contrast, an LEM is designed to understand emotional and psychological driving forces with the help of artificial intelligence. An LG spokesperson told StreamTV Insider: "It helps decode a viewer's mindset – what motivates them, what resonates – so brands can deliver more relevant and compelling marketing messages."

Smart TV manufacturers, TV-related platform developers such as Roku or Vizio and streaming providers are increasingly relying on targeted advertising for revenue in general. The shift towards advertising-financed media is taking place across the entire TV landscape. Critics see a network of data octopuses emerging behind this. Users could see the boundaries of their comfort zone and privacy overstepped. In the EU; the AI Regulation prohibits certain surveillance techniques such as remote emotion recognition or social scoring.

(nen)