LG Ads is getting serious about its presence in Australia. It’s not that LG Ad Solutions hasn’t been successful in Australia – it trails only the US, UK, and Canada – but there’s always room for more growth and to build stronger relationships with local buyers.
In January LG Ad Solutions brought over UK Senior Sales Director Alex Blundell Jones to head up a local team as Australia’s Commercial Director and this past week he has announced his first hires.
Alex Blundell Jones, Commercial Director LG Ads Solutions, Australia
Raiding Samsung Ads sales team, Marj Hetherton and Adelina Moon are now officially on board at LG Ad Solutions as Sales Directors.
“They’re really committed to the market and have a very close relationship with the LG content and distribution team, who are out in Parramatta,” Jones told Mediaweek. After years of a fractured LG team, Jones believes app-partners are now benefitting from a ‘joined-up’ experience.
“For our streaming apps, like our endemic advertisers who make up a very significant part of our revenue, we’ve been working with them from internationally,” Jones explained.
LG Ads has two distinct products. It is selling ads on the LG TV home screen and LG Channels – its FAST channel offer.
The hunger for LG’s connected TV experience has been rapidly growing. Over the past 12 months, LG reports a 70% growth in Monthly Active Users (MAU), 455% growth in ad requests, and the amount of time users are spending on devices has a 2.5x growth.
As with all connected TV platforms, the advertising capability continues to grow and develop, shaped by technology capability and market interests. “In Australia, we don’t do pause ads. We do do it in some other markets like the US. Screen saver ads we do offer, which is a relatively new innovative format for us, which is cool,” Jones advises.
It’s not an issue of Samsung Ads vs LG Ads
Talking to Jones, it becomes pretty clear that he doesn’t really view Samsung and its Samsung Ads products as competitors, but rather they make complimentary ad buys for advertisers seeking reach.
“Rather than just reaching 30% of the TVs in a country, you’d obviously want to reach 55 to 60%. You’ll work with multiple device partners to get you that reach. From an ad standpoint, you know, again, there’s very little overlap between LG and Samsung households.
“Based on our data, 2-3% of households that have an LG TV and also have a Samsung in, when we think about our two ad products, obviously our own streaming app and our home screen product, to see those you need an LG or vice versa with them. So, they very much can be used together to get maximum reach,” Jones said.
Of course, there is a certain amount of competition at play. “Clearly, if there’s only a defined amount of budget, and they can only work with one of them, there’s a few different kind of activation differences that we believe we can win on. One of them is removing the friction of activation. It’s a big difference. You know, the Australian market is very programmatic thirsty, thirsty for it even.
“We’ve done a lot of work to ensure that pretty much all of our formats can be bought via programmatic pipes,” he said.
LG’s FAST channels
As of August 2025, LG Ads has 135 FAST channels in the Australian market. Top genres locally are News, Sports, and Reality TV. There’s no real surprises there.
The channel line-up is eclectic. Users will find recognisable channels including Sky News Australia, Bloomberg, PGA Golf Channel, FIFA+, MMA, beIN Sport Connect, and PBS History. There are also many of the channels one regularly finds on FAST services globally with the likes of Fail Army, The Pet Collective, and NOSEY. And there’s also a number of show-specific channels including Mr Bean, Fear Factor, Bondi Vet, and Come Dine with Me.
Being that it is LG, the FAST service has a number of channels reflecting pop culture from South Korea, with multiple K-Drama themed channels.