- Eliminate wasted ad spend
- Fix the frequency problem
- Break down platform silos
- Improve viewer experience (and brand perception)
- Enable a true ‘frequency currency’
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: Optimising 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.
Faux promises
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.
Cross-company solution
And third, we need to see industry players more neutral to inventory monetisation 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?
This story was first published by MediaPost.com and is republished with the permission of the author.
Dave Morgan, a lawyer by training, is the CEO and founder of Simulmedia. He previously founded and ran both TACODA, Inc, an online advertising company that pioneered behavioural online marketing and was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $275 million, and Real Media, Inc, one of the world’s first ad serving and online ad network companies and a predecessor to 24/7 Real Media (TFSM), which was later sold to WPP for $649 million. Follow him on Twitter @davemorgannyc
