Yes, ad frequency matters, particularly on TV. It matters not just because delivering the same ad to the same person repeatedly is annoying and creates negative perceptions of the brand among
impacted viewers, but because it's a big waste of most advertisers' money when their TV spend only reaches a small portion of their target audience available at that time.
Why does
over-frequency happen on TV and premium video streaming?
First, over-frequency happens because the same brands keep buying the same highly rated shows, ensuring they saturate heavy TV viewers
while ignoring that the “media math” of TV advertising dictates that buying lots of small programs ensures maximum and most efficient dispersion (reach) among target audiences. See the
late Erwin Ephron’s brilliant paper, “Learning to live in Lilliput, the media land where small is beautiful: Optimizing reach with low ratings and other thoughts on TV
fragmentation.”
Second, over-frequency happens because digitally trained programmatic ad buyers request and receive “frequency caps” on their CTV campaigns. But, as anyone
who has ever watched ad-supported streaming services knows, frequency capping on most CTV programming is a farce -- a pure farce.
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Control over the sale and ad serving of most premium streaming
ad inventory is massively fragmented across dozens of demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, agencies, programmers, distributors, matching services, agencies and ad networks. Sure, they might
each promise a daily frequency cap of three, which means that collectively, any one viewer might get a dozen of the same ads each day on that programming, since each of the many entities are siloed
and can’t coordinate with each other to make good on the promise they sold their clients.
What should be done about this over-frequency problem? First, the industry needs to fess up
about it and stop making faux promises of frequency capping. Suggesting that it's being done is a lie. Second, stop pretending that over-frequency is okay. It is not. It is bad for viewers. It is bad
for advertisers. And it is bad for publishers.
And third, we need to see industry players more neutral to inventory monetization step up and offer a cross-company solution that manages and
measures actual frequency delivery by creative and campaign to each user and household: a “frequency currency.”
Who might this be? Nielsen and MediaOcean immediately come to mind,
but I could also imagine that any one of the heretofore “alt measurement movement” players could execute this.
Why not? There’s no technical barrier to doing it. Will
the TV companies, streamers and big tech platforms all play along? They might -- certainly if it was Nielsen, whom they are all already working with.
What do you think?