Starting & Selling Playground XYZ to GumGum. Rob Hall (Parallel) Media Tech Talk #41

There's a moment on the biggest screen in the home, just before you choose what to watch, that every advertiser now wants a piece of. In part two of his conversation with Daevid Richards, Alex Blundell Jones, Commercial Director, Australia at LG Ad Solutions, looks at the challenge he believes is reshaping the future of television, and what the TV can really offer advertisers in the AI era. It starts on the home screen. Alex explains how LG builds ads into a premium device without annoying the people who paid for it, why some categories have been quicker to get on board than others, and how new creative tools are turning a website link or an out of spec asset into something ready for the big screen. Countdown timers, QR codes and 3D creative all get a mention, along with a few campaigns that literally broke out of the frame. Then to performance. Television was built to sell brands, so what does an outcome look like for a TV manufacturer? Alex unpacks how LG Ads proves incrementally, how a home screen ad can be connected to what a viewer actually does days later, and what it takes to follow a conversion from the TV to the web. Daevid also tackles fragmentation: with video budgets spread across BVOD, streamers, FAST and the home screen, where is unduplicated reach hardest to solve, and how can device data help budgets go further? Finally, AI and sport. Alex tells the story of an advertiser who arrived late to the World Cup with every broadcast package already gone, and the engagement result that followed. He closes with his crystal ball: mergers and acquisitions, an in-home experience that may be hard to fathom, and where operating systems could turn up next.

Streaming has overtaken cable and broadcast in the United States, and the television itself has become something new: an operating system, a home screen, a bundle of free channels and an ad platform in its own right. So can a television manufacturer really compete with the broadcasters for video budgets? Daevid Richards puts that question to Alex Blundell Jones, Commercial Director, Australia at LG Ad Solutions, the person sent from London to open the Australian market from a standing start.

Knowing an ad was served is one thing. Knowing it was looked at is another. But was it the right ad, and did it actually land with the person on the other side of the screen? In Part 2, Rob Hall, founder and CEO of Parallel, tells Daevid why he came back from a year off to start all over again, and reveals the thread that runs from the attention business he sold to the one he is building now.

Part one introduced the agents. Part two asks the harder questions. When software is negotiating with software at machine speed, who is actually in control, and what happens when something goes wrong?

For years, automation in advertising meant software following rules: bidding, buying, optimising. What is emerging now is something different. AI agents that reason, negotiate and strike deals on your behalf, on both sides of the trade.