Samsung Ads continues to enhance smart TV ad opportunities with the launch of a new format: First Screen Immersive Masthead banner ads. This new banner format enables brands to reach audiences on the home screens of six million smart TVs in Canada. The First Screen Immersive Masthead experience is currently available on 2024 Samsung Smart TVs and will be available on the brand’s 2023 TVs by end of this year.

“Navigation and discovering content can often make or break a user’s experience when they turn on their TVs, especially because a third of consumers often don’t know what they want to watch,” says Dave Pauk, director, head of Canadian Sales, Samsung Ads Canada. “Our deep understanding of our viewer behaviors from across our 6M available smart TVs enables us to develop innovative native ad experiences like the First Screen Masthead that are impactful, seamless and eye catching to consumers.”

The new ad format is first seen when consumers turn on the screen and actively looking to discover new content, apps or services. The home screen banners will expand once user-prompted to a full screen video and cycle through a carousel of creative. This placement provides opportunities for brand engagement alongside personalized content recommendations and shortcuts to apps.

Pauk adds, “We’ve spent the last four and a half years since we launched in 2019, educating our industry and our clients on what the capabilities are with Samsung Ads, in particular. With and our six million smart TVs that we have now and using ACR (automatic content recognition) data and device data to truly maximize the outcome that brands are looking for. I mean, can people actually buy a TV today that isn’t a connectable TV?”