How to Avoid Ad Repetition in CTV with Frequency Capping

The number of connected TV (CTV) households could potentially grow by 82% by 2023, as per Innovid. Hence, according to one eMarketer forecast, US programmatic CTV video ad spending will grow to $6.73 billion in 2021.

On the technical side of things, advertisers now enjoy more advanced targeting options due to this widespread embrace of OTT. They can precisely target key messages to viewers. However, advertisers buying in-stream video ad inventory run the risk of showing audiences the same ad in succession. The results are wasted impressions and budget, a low ROI, and annoyed viewers. However, frequency capping is an effective solution to this.

What is Frequency Capping?

Ad frequency refers to the number of times your ad is displayed to a particular user over a given period. This can be per day, week, or month.

There are two common ad frequency issues. The first is overexposure. When the ad or campaign frequency is set too high, target audiences will repeatedly see the same ads and become less responsive to them. This is known as ad fatigue. To prevent ad fatigue, advertisers want to avoid showing their ads to the same people too often. Ad frequency is selected based on the product being advertised, and where the customer is in the sales funnel, keeping in mind the business life cycle of the product or service advertised.

The flip side of ad frequency issues lies in underexposure. If your target audience isn’t seeing many of your ads, your brand awareness will remain low. Hence, this will also lead to a low ROI on any ad inventory purchased for the ad campaign’s duration.

Frequency capping is how advertisers and publishers create the balance needed in ad frequency. It is a feature for managing how many times an ad will appear to a specific viewer. Thankfully, most sophisticated ad monetization platforms, like TheViewPoint, can tackle ad frequency and control when and how often ads are shown to CTV audiences.

The Critical Benefits of Frequency Capping

Increased reach

Frequency capping gives advertisers the ability to seek new viewers, increasing their chances of attracting and converting new leads. To drive better results, advertisers need to be getting unique impressions for their ads. Anything otherwise will significantly hurt the ROI.

Higher VTR

Although CTV ads are immune to the banner blindness problem whereby people ignore or avoid ads, viewer burnout may still affect some campaigns. This can result in ad blindness. View-Through Rates (VTR) have been shown to drop precipitously after the first exposure, and are most likely to plateau after four impressions. Frequency capping will help improve the ad campaign’s performance as it keeps the views unique.

Better Ad Viewing Experience

For consumers, frequency capping brings a less irritating and more diverse ad viewing experience. This, in turn, results in the likelihood of some products capturing their attention and turning into purchases, downloads or subscriptions.

How it Works: Frequency Cap Options

Let’s take a detailed look at how frequency capping works. It has three essential components. Namely:

• How many times an ad should be shown, e.g., 1 or 15 times.
• The hierarchy of the element to be capped, e.g., specific creative, campaign, or advertiser.
• The duration until the cap resets, e.g., hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

To set a frequency cap, a publisher only needs to define how many times an individual will see an ad within a specified period. Time frames can vary from an hour, to a lifetime value. It can be discussed at the negotiation stage for example, a “3×24” frequency cap translates to 3 views per 24 hours in layman’s terms. When enforced, the user will only see a specific creative three times in a single day.

It is now up to advertisers to give viewers what they want; a balance between privacy and optimal ad frequency.

The Perception Around Ad Repetition on CTV

In the CTV environment, frequency capping is more complex compared to display ads. A video with multiple ad breaks can be used for ad repetition or sequential messaging. But no matter how long a video is, there would be zero benefits to showing the viewer one ad ten times over. Thus CTV ad servers require advertisers and publishers to apply frequency capping best practices as more impressions do not necessarily mean better ad performance.

Ad pods have also ushered in a different approach to CTV ads. They work much like linear TV adverts. Several ads are played one after another within a break, improving the ad experience –  especially for long videos. By leveraging competitive ad separation, the sequence of advertisements in the pod will only contain creatives from one brand category.  Ad pods additionally use deduplication, which prevents the same ads from being repeated in one ad pod.

Through repeated exposure to an ad reinforces the value proposition of acquiring the product/service, repetition without frequency capping could result in consumer ad fatigue and intentional avoidance of the product/service.

Given the fragmented nature of today’s streaming ad landscape, it is highly likely a consumer could switch viewing platforms multiple times in an evening. According to research by the Leichtman Research Group, 55% of households in the US use numerous streaming services. These factors increase the chances of one viewer watching the same ads across multiple apps.

In the end, viewers can become understandably frustrated by ad repetition, thus ruining their viewing experience and worsening their attitude towards the brand. Advertisers need to avoid going down the slope of diminishing returns and running ineffective campaigns.

Conclusions

Applying frequency capping is a tried and tested way of improving campaign performance and ensuring cost-effective ad buying. To make the most of it, start by experimenting with frequency caps to find the optimal number of impressions needed for the message to resonate with the target audience. Optimizing frequency and inventory makes it possible to boost ROI on streaming ad spend while providing CTV viewers with a positive brand experience.