The long-held role of television as a top-of-funnel, awareness-driving medium is being fundamentally rewritten by digitization. Once a channel measured primarily by reach and frequency, television is now transforming the living room screen into a performance-driven platform where advertisers can track, attribute, and optimize campaigns in real time.
This evolution is proving particularly potent in specialized verticals like healthcare, where the ultimate goal is not just brand recognition but tangible patient engagement and outcomes.
This new reality puts television in a “very different perspective than it was before,” making it a “real direct action channel,” according to Julian Zilberbrand, global head of data solutions, LG Ad Solutions, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
From the household to the handset
But the key to unlocking this potential lies in understanding the complete household media ecosystem, moving beyond the television screen itself. For Zilberbrand, the ability to connect TV viewership with activity on other devices like mobile phones and tablets is what enables a more sophisticated and effective advertising experience.
“At LG, we know who’s in the LG household. We know which devices are there,” he said. “We know what you’re exposed to on TV and we know how to extend that reach into mobile. We know how to provide potentially sequential messaging.”
This cross-device knowledge allows brands to have a continuous conversation with consumers across different touchpoints. “Our goal ultimately is to communicate with the consumer in a manner that allows them to have a great advertising experience and for us to understand how to properly reach, conversate, and deliver results,” Zilberbrand added.
Keeping compliance in its lane
In the highly-regulated healthcare sector, balancing effective targeting with stringent privacy compliance is important. Zilberbrand advocated for a strategy of focused expertise and strategic partnerships, ensuring that sensitive patient data is handled by specialists and kept separate from viewership data.
LG Ad Solutions and Swoop announced a partnership in 2023 to bring privacy-safe targeting to healthcare advertisers on CTV.
“We leave patient data to the experts, whether that’s Swoop, as a perfect example of a company who really knows what happens with patients,” he said. “We bring our expertise for what people are watching and how they’re engaging in the television environment.”
This collaborative model creates a “privacy safe environment” by allowing anonymized audiences from partners to be matched against LG’s viewership data without co-mingling personally identifiable health information.
The future is interactive
Zilberbrand predicted television will continue its evolution from a passive, “lean-back” medium to a fully interactive “lean-in” environment. He pointed to the growing adoption of QR codes as an early sign of this behavioral shift. The market appears poised to support this transformation, with eMarketer forecasting that combined US TV and CTV ad spending will grow by over $12 billion between 2023 and 2027, driven entirely by the digital side.
“Over the course of time, TV will become more and more an engagement environment… your TV will ostensibly become your phone on a screen,” he said. “Because of that future-facing scenario, you will have an opportunity to engage directly with the TV and have it be much more attributable for conversions and things of that nature.”
He anticipates that emerging technologies like artificial intelligence will accelerate this change, making the television a central hub for direct consumer interaction. “AI will allow for you to engage directly with your TV using your voice,” Zilberbrand said. “There will be other capabilities and feature sets that allow for advertising to be much more interactive. And with that comes the attribution, comes the engagement.”
You’re watching “Omnichannel Starts with TV: The Evolving Role of TV in Healthcare Marketing”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Swoop. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
