LG is not like Roku, or Samsung, or Amazon. When you turn on an LG television and land on the home screen, the ads you see aren’t sold by LG. They’re sold by Teads — an arrangement the two companies just renewed and extended into Italy, Greece, and Cyprus, cementing one of the stranger structures in connected-TV advertising.
The renewal, announced Thursday, keeps Teads (NASDAQ: TEAD) as the exclusive global seller of LG HomeScreen: the full-width masthead that sits above app tiles on every LG smart TV. The deal now spans more than twenty countries across Europe and Asia Pacific, essentially every major market LG ships televisions to outside the United States, where LG also runs a direct ad-sales operation.
Viewed in isolation, it’s a renewal. Viewed across the smart-TV operating system landscape, it’s an anomaly.
Roku sells its own home-screen inventory through OneView and its Roku One platform. Samsung sells Tizen inventory through Samsung Ads. Amazon sells Fire TV inventory through Amazon Ads. Vizio’s SmartCast has sat inside Walmart Connect since Walmart closed its acquisition of Vizio in late 2024. Only LG hands its most visible placement to someone else, and has now done so in a renewed contract that covers more geography than the previous one.
The timing matters. The 2026 NewFronts are weeks away, the broadcast upfronts follow in May, and agency holdco buyers are in the middle of one of the loudest supply-path-optimization cycles the industry has ever run. Every extra middleman between advertiser and inventory is under pressure to justify its cut. Teads has just secured another year, at least, of being the middleman LG’s home screen comes through.
There’s a reason LG might find the arrangement worth preserving. The original partnership with Teads began quietly in 2023, covering just France and Belgium. In March 2024 it expanded to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and ten more APAC countries. In the two years since, Teads itself has changed shape in ways that make it a materially bigger partner than it was when LG first signed on.
Outbrain Inc. closed its acquisition of Teads on February 3, 2025 for about $900 million: $625 million in cash, and 43.75 million Outbrain shares worth roughly $263 million at close. The combined company took the Teads brand and began trading under a new ticker on Nasdaq on June 10, 2025. The post-merger Teads operates in thirty-six countries with around 1,800 employees and relationships with more than 10,000 publishers and 20,000 advertisers.
Translation: the partner LG chose in 2023 is now materially larger, better-funded, and operationally present in most of the places LG sells televisions. That’s what a lucky bet looks like in retrospect.
The companies paired the renewal with performance data, the usual way these deals get dressed up for the press. A study they commissioned from a firm called the MediaMento Institute, based on 100 smart-TV viewers, found HomeScreen video ads drew a 48 percent attention rate — 16 percent higher than skippable pre-roll on the same screens. Three-dimensional formats, the study reported, captured attention 29 percent faster than standard video. The companies didn’t disclose anything about the methodology beyond the sample size.
David Kostman, the Teads CEO, said the renewal “accelerates our CTV strategy.” Serge Matta, LG Ad Solutions’ president of global ad sales, said it lets them “bring LG Ad Solutions’ HomeScreen inventory to more markets.” Neither quote does much on its own.
What the quotes confirm is that this deal, which looked geographically quirky and structurally odd when it began, is now positioned to matter through the weeks when CTV ad budgets get decided. If any other smart-TV operating system looks at LG’s setup and concludes the exclusive-reseller model has advantages the in-house approach is missing, Teads will have built the template.
The financial terms and duration of the renewal weren’t disclosed.
