There are numerous business and technical culprits for why ad frequency (or over frequency) remains such a persistent problem. TV companies let too many sources of demand sell all at once, and they don’t talk to each other. Much of the ad tech was built for display, and can’t handle TV advertising’s unique needs. And so on.
Or, maybe there is a simpler answer. Brands and agencies - each operating in silos - typically focus on their individual goals and think (believe) they are doing a stellar job. And they do this without thinking about the consumer at all.
This vast disconnect is at the core of the CTV ad problem, per Cadent president Doug Rozen.
"[Regular viewers] are not sitting there saying, 'That brand has great frequency,’” said Rozen as we sat down in Cannes to record the latest episode of Next in Media. ‘[They] sit there and say, 'Make it stop!'" We talk about all the great targeting we can do, but what consumers experience is persistence, not precision.”
Rozen and his team’s pitch to brands and media buyers is one that many have been preaching for a while: you should evaluate, plan, buy and optimize all of your video at the same time. Creators, TV, YouTube, etc.
“YouTube gets planned by the video team, the search team, the programmatic team, or the social team. It should be part of a video strategy.” Ideally that strategy consists of “one plan, one audience, one time,” he said. Simple in theory, complicated in practice in an industry that is addicted to siloing.
Tinuiti’s Sean Odlum echoed this point in a recent podcast episode, where he advocated for treating YouTube as its unique, increasingly vital, ‘own thing’ in media buying. “A lot of brands, a lot of agencies have really struggled with this... we're going to keep coming back to this theme... it is so many different things. Yes, it is TV. It's a streaming platform. It's a commerce platform."
Rozen and Cadent believe things will change the more that advertisers start to focus on context in TV - and moving past the idea of treating TV targeting like everything else on the web. That’s a shift in framing that may require some time.
“There’s too much emphasis on the notion of connected television and not enough on the contextualization of the video,” he said. “You’re not focusing on the context. You’re just trying to get to the person. You’re missing the value.”
Check out the full interview here: