Why Ad Frequency on CTV Is Frustrating — and Why It No Longer Has to Be
Arguably the most famous ad of all time ran only once. It was Apple’s “1984” spot, which aired during Super Bowl XVIII. It hit like a sledgehammer.
Most brands, however, have to run their ads many times to break through. This concept, of course, is called frequency, and it’s one that every marketer knows — and most struggle with. You have to hit prospective customers the right number of times before an ad message hits home.
Some marketers subscribe to the rule of sevens; the concept is that our brains must be exposed to a product or service seven times before we are ready to make a purchase. There’s a balancing act, however. Not enough frequency is bad, but so is too much. Most advertisers have a frequency in mind and strive to hit that number with individual consumers — but it’s a challenge.
Seeing spots over and over again
As we have entered an era of ad-supported streaming, there probably isn’t one of us who hasn’t been turned off by an ad that appears over and over on streaming. You see it a couple of times when you’re binge-watching your favorite show on Netflix. Then you see the same spot again and again on Hulu. We’ve all been there.
Up until now, there hasn’t been an effective way for brands to manage frequency for households across platforms, so we’ve all experienced that sinking feeling when the same ad keeps popping up.
You don’t like this feeling when you watch TV with your friends or family, and you definitely don’t like it as an advertiser. Controlling how often an ad is viewed is a critical component of successful campaigns. A challenge in frequency management for brands is that frequency averages can often be misleading. For example, let’s say your analysis leads you to decide that your target should see about six to eight impressions over a two-week period. After your campaign runs, you see a frequency average of seven, and you think you hit the mark. But in actuality, 40% of households saw one to three ads, 20% saw four to nine ads, and the remainder saw more than nine, with some seeing 25!
Even though the average was seven, that’s not effective frequency management.
A fundamental problem with current methods of frequency management is that they are siloed. With existing technology, advertisers and media providers must define caps on a one-to-one basis — one frequency cap per publisher or DSP platform. But the typical DSP is blind to about half of the impression in a brand campaign. This lack of unified insights leads to impressions shown repeatedly to the same audiences. It frustrates everyone: brands, agencies, publishers, and consumers.
New from Innovid: Harmony Frequency
But now there’s a way to ensure that you’re reaching your prospects the right amount — and fill in the gaps left by siloed publishers and DSPs. Introducing Innovid's Harmony Frequency.
The latest innovation in our Harmony initiative, Harmony Frequency is a holistic frequency management solution that optimizes campaigns across CTV and digital advertising. This new product makes it far more likely that a household will see an advertiser’s spot the intended number of times.
Here’s how it works. Harmony Frequency provides DSPs with frequency intelligence across a brand’s entire media portfolio before they bid. This capability helps brands and agencies reduce ad waste, strengthen campaign effectiveness, and improve the viewing experience for consumers — who will no longer get annoyed by watching your ad repeatedly.
Powered by Innovid’s critical infrastructure for TV, Harmony Frequency offers frequency intelligence across digital and CTV advertising. The solution provides rich data signals to DSPs, integrating frequency management insights directly into programmatic buying strategies before the bid is made. Harmony Frequency shifts frequency management from the final mile to the starting line, integrating insights directly into the programmatic buying strategy.
Harmony Frequency’s benefits
The benefits of Harmony Frequency are powerful for advertisers, who can:
- Reduce wasted spend by preventing overexposure.
- Maximize budgets by reallocating spend to underexposed households.
- Improve the viewing experience by eliminating ad fatigue.
Harmony Frequency is just one way that Innovid is working to make the digital and CTV advertising ecosystem more effective and efficient for advertisers.
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