In the rapidly evolving streaming ecosystem, a sea of change is underway in how we define the “prime real estate” of the living room. Across the advertising landscape, it has become increasingly clear that the home screen is no longer just a functional utility; it is the new front page of television.
For many TV platforms, these placements appear in the interface viewers encounter before selecting an app or piece of content. For others, like Telly, the home screen environment is built into a persistent second-screen experience. Regardless of the configuration, as streaming platforms seek deeper, more sustained engagement for brands and especially for media and entertainment dollars, the home screen has shifted from a navigation menu into a platform delivering powerful “first impression” moments for both audiences and advertisers.
Home Screen Engagement Data Is Strong
The industry-wide excitement around this format is backed by significant performance data:
- Research from LG Ad Solutions found home screen ads deliver double-digit increases in attention retention compared with traditional skippable pre-roll formats.
- An Omnicom-backed study found that home screen units produced significantly higher attention metrics than linear TV placements while reporting three times less media wastage than scrollable social ads.
- There is also growing evidence that these placements enhance the effectiveness of traditional advertising. In a study conducted by Telly for a major automotive brand, home screen placements were synchronized with broadcast and streaming spots to amplify campaign impact and were found to lift overall brand recall by 250 percent compared with traditional placements alone.
Taken together, these studies point to a common conclusion: when advertising appears within the television interface itself, it is freed from the time and creative confines of the traditional 30-second ad pod, benefiting from the large-screen, lean-back environment and focused viewer attention.
Less waste, higher engagement, and stronger recall help explain why interest in this format has accelerated so quickly.
Yet to date, two factors have limited the full promise of home screen advertising: available inventory and a lack of standardization. The good news is that both challenges are now being actively addressed across the industry.
New Innovations Unlock Greater Opportunities
It is true that on most traditional smart TVs today, the home screen still functions as a transient gateway where viewers spend only a few minutes browsing before disappearing into a full screen content app. But we are beginning to see meaningful shifts in how the interface itself is designed. Platforms like Samsung’s Smart Hub and LG’s webOS increasingly surface recommendations, live programming, and curated content directly within the home interface, keeping viewers engaged in the discovery layer rather than immediately pushing them into individual apps.
Other hardware models are pushing this thinking even further. Telly completely reimagines the traditional television design offering a dual screen platform that moves core TV functionality alongside personally curated live news, sports, weather, and content recommendations all into a persistent home screen. The smart home screen operates continuously in tandem with the primary theatre screen delivering literally hundreds of opportunities each day to engage consumers.
The structural effect of these innovations is changing the math of the television front page. Where most smart TVs today capture only a few minutes of home screen engagement before viewers disappear into content, persistent interface models can extend that interaction window to several hours per day. This evolves the home screen from a “first moment” into an “every moment” opportunity with an always-on canvas that remains present throughout the viewing session.
Standardization is Here!
As this category matures, the next frontier is standardization. Historically, home screen ads (or what some call “menu ads”) have sat behind walled garden ecosystems, each with unique nuances that have hamstrung a consistent approach to engagement for buyers. That too is changing. Telly has been working alongside companies from all sides of the marketplace supporting the IAB Tech Lab’s Ad Format Hero Taskforce developing new CTV standards as part of the CTV Ad Portfolio to ensure a shared framework for programmatic buying and selling, consistent measurement, and creative innovation across platforms. The signaling is in place. Now the industry needs to put it to work.
This standardization of formats and signals enables buyers to access this emerging inventory through familiar programmatic pipes, unlocking scale that has historically been out of reach. As inventory expands and standards take hold, the programmatic marketplace is already beginning to lean in. Magnite’s SpringServe, for example, has started enabling programmatic transactions for home screen units across CTV platforms like Telly and others, with plans to introduce full programmatic bidding with several of the largest DSPs in Q2.
Adopting these standards industry-wide and offering markedly increased engagement time is critical for the programmatic ecosystem to fully embrace what may be the most important new frontier in television: a high-attention, native environment that blends the captivating power of TV with the precision and flexibility of digital.
Mike Shehan
CRO
Telly