LG to Personalize Smart TV Ads Using AI-Powered Emotion Recognition

Artificial Intelligence in the Living Room: LG Focuses on Emotional Advertising on Smart TVs

LG Electronics plans to personalize the delivery of advertising on its Smart TVs using Artificial Intelligence (AI). The goal is to tailor advertising more closely to the individual characteristics of viewers by analyzing their emotions and psychographic traits.

To achieve this, LG subsidiary LG Ad Solutions has partnered with the US company Zenapse. Zenapse offers a marketing platform that uses AI-powered emotional intelligence and psychographic targeting to increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. The technology is expected to be deployed on over 200 million LG Smart TVs worldwide.

How does emotional advertising work?

In contrast to traditional advertising methods, which rely, for example, on the current program context, the new approach aims to capture the viewers' emotions and values. Instead of just considering demographic data such as age or gender, Zenapse's technology also analyzes psychological factors. This information is used to create emotionally appealing advertising messages tailored to the respective target group.

Zenapse uses, among other things, a so-called "Large Emotion Model" (LEM), which works similarly to language models (LLMs) but is specialized in the analysis of emotions. This model is intended to decipher the viewers' mindset and motivations to enable more relevant and persuasive advertising.

What data is used?

Zenapse's technology draws on various data sources, including publicly available information about the scripts and plots of movies and series. In addition, the system analyzes viewer behavior to categorize users into different target groups, such as "ambitious high-achievers" or "social networkers".

Furthermore, the technology also uses data collected by LG through its Smart TVs. This includes Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology, which recognizes what content the user is currently consuming. This information is then combined with Zenapse's data to create a comprehensive profile of the viewer.

Criticism and data privacy concerns

The increasing personalization of advertising in the Smart TV sector raises questions about data privacy. Critics fear that the boundaries of users' privacy could be crossed. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the upcoming AI Act already set limits by restricting certain monitoring techniques such as remote diagnosis of emotions or social scoring.

It remains to be seen how the new technology from LG and Zenapse will prove itself in practice and how users will react to the personalized, emotion-based advertising. The discussion about data privacy and the ethical implications of AI-powered advertising will continue in the future.