Repetition can make for a successful campaign, like when Temu played the same ad five times during last year’s Super Bowl and saw a 45% spike in app downloads, per Harris Poll. However, overexposure runs the risk of irritating your audience.
In the connected TV (CTV) space, overexposure, or when viewers are shown the same ad too many times, is a top concern for advertisers. Thirty-nine percent of CTV/OTT advertisers cited transparency on where ads were running as one of their biggest challenges in CTV/OTT marketing, according to an April 2024 Advertiser Perceptions and Premion study.
As more brands move their ad dollars over to CTV, our analyst Ross Benes calls overexposure “the biggest bugaboo in streaming.”
Finding your audience and keeping it
The good news for CTV advertisers is that their audiences are becoming less irritated by ad breaks, according to Hub Research, which found that consumers who feel watching ads is worth a lower subscription cost increased from 58% in 2021 to 66% in 2024.
While seeing the same ad on repeat can increase recall, that recall doesn’t translate into purchase intent, according to a Nexxen study. Those who saw an ad six times had the highest awareness at 92% recall. However, there was a 16% decline in viewers’ intent to purchase from seeing the ad once to seeing it six times.
When advertising in CTV, adjusting your targeting approach can help, according to Freddy Dabaghi, chief transformation officer at agency Crispin. Since the CTV space doesn’t rely on cookies, advertisers turn to interest or contextual-based targeting, he said. When you’re casting a wide net, the amount of times each audience member sees an ad isn’t taken into account. The combination of broad targeting, as well as “the variety of ways you can buy CTV” are supporting that overexposure risk, he said.
“Focusing on an ID graph enables us to manage reach and frequency at a user base while still taking advantage of the diverse ways of buying,” he said. “We also leverage tools that aggregate delivery data and ensure consistent frequency capping across devices and publishers.”
Sharing responsibility
When it comes to CTV, said Benes, each stakeholder—the advertisers, the streaming services and the vendors—must make changes to foster more effective buys.
“The streaming services have to get better about being honest on audience parameters so that they aren't taking more spend than they can deliver on the particular target,” he said. “The advertisers should spread money out to various streaming services, and ask for their spend to be stretched out over time rather than pushed out quickly. The vendors should have more guardrails about flagging when the same ad is served too many times in a short duration.”
Benes said finding solutions that both uphold the appeal of targeted ads while controlling for repetition requires responsibility across programmatic buyers, advertisers, and streaming services.
“It takes two to tango,” he said. “In programmatic advertising, it takes a whole lineup of companies to tango.”
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