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Samsung, LG and Vizio sell ads on the TV home screen and your viewing data
Publication date: 15.09.2026
Коротко
- Smartphone and smart TV makers (OEMs) — Samsung, LG, Vizio, Xiaomi and others — sell home-screen ad placements and viewing data collected through ACR technology.
- This affects any brand buying CTV or mobile ads through programmatic: part of the inventory and audience segments comes from the OEM itself, not from apps or carriers.
- Before launching a CTV campaign, check the media plan for the OEM inventory share and the data source behind targeting, rather than trusting raw reach numbers.
What an OEM is and where its ad revenue comes from
OEM is manufacturing shorthand for the maker of a device: a phone, tablet or smart TV. In advertising it is not an abstraction but a distinct class of media owner, because an OEM controls the operating system, the home screen and the app store — territory an individual app developer cannot reach.
Monetization runs on three layers. First, surface inventory: home-screen tiles, lock screens, notification feeds, bundled services such as Samsung TV Plus. Second, data: ACR (automatic content recognition) software "samples what is on screen every 500 milliseconds", identifies programs and ads, then sells the result as targeting segments — LG, for instance, distributes viewing data from 33 million opted-in sets. Third, OS licensing to other manufacturers: Roku licenses its system to more than 45 TV brands, and Digital Turbine reported more than 3 billion app preloads by March 2020.
| Who | What they sell | Example |
|---|---|---|
| OEM (manufacturer) | Home screen, ACR viewing data | Samsung, LG, Vizio |
| App | Ads inside its own interface | Netflix, YouTube |
| Carrier / platform | Ads within its own OS, plus licensing to others | Roku — both its own OEM and a licence to 45+ brands |
Why the practice is disputed
The core conflict is user consent. Texas sued device manufacturers over ACR data collection without express consent, calling the privacy-setting design deceptive. In February 2026 Samsung agreed to stop collecting ACR data without explicit opt-in — the mechanics are laid out in PPC Land's explainer on the OEM advertising market.
95%home-screen ads already run on 95% of connected TVs in the US — ignoring this inventory in a CTV buy is no longer realistic
There is a second problem: data quality. Because ACR participation is opt-in, the dataset is by definition incomplete and uneven across households. Security researchers separately found residential-proxy code in 1,213 of 2,851 tested webOS apps and in more than a quarter of Tizen apps tested — meaning traffic from some devices could technically be routed through other people's networks without the owner's knowledge.
OEM segments already sit in Ukrainian media plans
Direct OEM deals are rare in Ukraine, but advertisers buying CTV or mobile programmatic through DV360 and other DSPs with US or EU reach get OEM inventory and ACR segments bundled in — often without realising it. The reach of these segments is almost always modelled: data from a voluntary sample is stretched across the whole device base. It would be interesting to see how many DSP account managers could name the opt-in rate behind their segment if asked directly.
