LG has partnered with AI startup Zenapse and will leverage its proprietary large emotion model (LEM) to power advertising that reflects viewers’ moods and emotions. Building on Zenapse’s “emotional AI and psychographic targeting,” the companies say they will “redefine viewer engagement, personalization, and campaign performance” by applying the technology to LG Ad Solutions’ advanced connected TV platform. As part of the multi-year deal, Zenapse and LG Innovation Labs will work to develop new CTV ad products that integrate emotional intelligence to deliver “more meaningful and measurable brand experiences across 200 million LG smart TVs globally.”

“LG will use Zenapse’s technology to divide webOS users into hyper-specific market segments that are supposed to be more informative to advertisers,” writes Ars Technica, noting “the technology will be used to inform ads shown on LG smart TVs’ homescreens, free ad-supported TV (FAST) channels, and elsewhere throughout webOS.”

While advertising creatives have long aimed to elicit consumer emotions, LG and Zenapse are trying “to do some reverse engineering of sorts and instead zero in on audience emotions and motivators beforehand so that advertisers can deliver more precisely targeted CTV ad messages that resonate with viewers’ personal mindsets,” StreamTV Insider explains.

Headquartered in Connecticut, Zenapse is an AI-first software as a service (SaaS) company launched in 2021. The company’s foundation AI model is called ZenVision, trained to power “the world’s first large emotion model knowledge graph.”

ZenVision data is anonymously aggregated “from over 150 million consumers across 3.5 billion data points in real time,” Zenapse says in a 2024 statement announcing an $8 million funding round.

“Our partnership with LG Ad Solutions will enable marketers to deliver stronger customer experiences through emotionally intelligent insights backed by AI,” Zenapse CEO and co-founder Matthew Bernardini said in an announcement. “Embarking on this new collaboration allows us to expand our reach and growing global footprint across all digital mediums.”

The idea is for ZenVision “to interpret the types of emotions shown in the content someone is watching on TV, partially by using publicly available information about the show’s or movie’s script and plot,” reports Ars Technica.

Tom’s Guide adds that it “watches along with the content being played on the screen to better understand the emotional state the viewer might be in,”

Terms of the partnership allow ZenVision “to use data that LG has gathered from the automatic content recognition software in LG TVs,” Ars Technica notes. The announcement says the deal allows LG Ad Solutions full access to ZenVision for CTV and Zenapse’s proprietary LEM to expand new software development and go-to-market products.