• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

I was watching a show on one of the major streaming platforms last week  -- a show I won't name because it doesn't matter. I counted how many times I saw the same ad in a single episode. The answer was four. In roughly 45 minutes of content, the same 30-second spot ran four times, twice in the same ad pod. I sat there thinking about the advertiser, about the money they spent to reach me, and about the fact that by the third time I saw that spot, I was actively annoyed with the brand. 

I work in advertising. I understand the mechanics of reach and frequency. I know why repetition matters, and I know the rule of thumb around effective frequency has been debated for decades. Still, I found myself sitting on my couch, genuinely irritated at an industry I have spent my career in, for failing to solve a problem we have known about for years.

This year, CTV upfront ad spending is projected to exceed prime-time linear TV upfront spending for the first time, crossing $17.7 billion against linear's $16.9 billion. Overall, digital video is on track to surpass $80 billion in total U.S. ad spend, growing at nearly twice the rate of the broader ad market.

Every major holding company, every brand with a meaningful media budget, is increasing its streaming allocation. The money is flowing in the right direction.  The user experience, on the other hand, is not keeping up.

The frequency problem in CTV is neither new nor a secret. The core issue is structural. CTV does not have a universal creative ID standard for programmatically served ads, which means a demand-side publisher on one side of the buy has no reliable way to communicate with a publisher on the other side about how many times a given household has already seen a given spot.

You buy across Netflix, Peacock, Hulu, and a handful of FAST channels, and each of those environments operates in isolation when it comes to frequency management. The same goes for most other channels unless you consolidate your spend on a single platform, which rarely happens.  The result is the same ad, over and over again, because no single system has a complete view of the landscape.

There are people working on this problem.  For example, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab has been working on a Creative Ad ID Framework. There is genuine progress at the standards level, yet when you survey CTV advertisers, half cite frequency control as one of the most valuable improvements the industry could make. 

That gap should concern everyone spending money in this channel. CTV commands premium CPMs, often $25 to $65, depending on the inventory tier, precisely because it promises something linear TV could not always deliver: precision. You are not buying a broad demographic on a network. You are buying a specific household, on a specific device, in a lean-back environment, with high attention and high completion rates. That’s a valuable proposition.

But if the precision of targeting is not matched by the precision of frequency management, you aren’t delivering on that promise. You’re just running a more expensive version of the same blunt instrument.

The walled garden dynamic makes all of this harder. The largest players in CTV, the ones with the most inventory and the most audience data, have the least incentive to solve for cross-platform frequency, because interoperability doesn’t benefit them. If you’re buying inside a closed ecosystem, frequency management is a solved problem. The moment you step outside, which most advertisers do, because no single platform gives you the reach you need, the problem returns. Being good at walled-garden frequency management and at open-ecosystem frequency management are, in practice, almost mutually exclusive goals.

We moved away from linear TV partly because it felt like a blunt instrument: mass reach, limited targeting, repetitive ad loads, and very little accountability for what actually happened after the spot aired. Streaming was supposed to fix all of that. In many ways, it has. In at least one very noticeable, very irritating way, it has not.

The same ad shown four times during one show: We can do better than that.