Holistic Frequency Management Explained

Sponsored by Innovid

Ad fatigue, waste, missed reach. In the world of CTV, poorly managed frequency is one of the most frustrating but fixable challenges for both advertisers and audiences.  

But why does this problem persist? 

The short answer: fragmentation. While advertisers try to cap frequency within DSP or publisher platforms, there’s no cohesive way to understand total exposure across a campaign – especially when buys are split between programmatic and direct, multiple DSPs, or across linear and CTV. 

The result is the same ad delivered to the same household again and again – and again.

The AdTech Explained Team developed this explainer, in partnership with Innovid, to help you understand the frequency conundrum at the heart of modern advertising, with a look at why some methods have fallen short, and how new technologies are changing the game.

First things first: What is frequency management?

In advertising, frequency management is the process of controlling how often an ad is delivered to a given household, user, or device across a campaign. It’s often confused with frequency capping, which simply places a limit on how many times an ad can appear within a specific platform or placement. But true frequency management is more holistic. It’s about achieving the right level of exposure—not just avoiding the wrong one.

And why does this matter? 

Simply put, overexposure wastes media dollars, hurts performance, and irritates audiences. At the same time, underexposure means missed opportunities to drive outcomes or reinforce a message. Getting frequency right—especially across multiple platforms—is increasingly difficult as media fragmentation accelerates.

Despite years of advancement in ad tech, advertisers still struggle with managing exposure across channels. Most frequency controls are siloed—applied at the DSP or publisher level. That means a user watching content across YouTube, Hulu, and a free ad-supported app might see the same ad multiple times in each environment, with no coordination across them.

Why does CTV pose such a challenge?

CTV has become the most visible example of the struggle. It’s where the costs are highest, and where the viewer experience is most disrupted by redundancy. In CTV, ad fatigue doesn’t just damage ROI—it can actively turn viewers against a brand.

CTV combines the worst of all frequency challenges: high CPMs, fractured inventory, limited identity resolution, and very little cross-platform coordination. Even as more premium CTV inventory becomes available programmatically, the lack of shared identifiers and measurement standards makes frequency management elusive.

Unlike web and mobile environments, where cookies and device IDs once made frequency control (somewhat) possible, CTV lacks consistent identifiers across apps, devices, and publishers. A campaign might run across four or five apps on a single household’s TV—and none of those apps are talking to each other.

For advertisers, this means wasted impressions. For audiences, it means watching the same non-skippable 30-second spot seven times in a row.

If it’s a problem for advertisers, it’s an area of investment for ad tech, right? What solutions are out there?

Companies are working on better ways to manage frequency—especially in CTV. Most existing approaches involve deduplicating exposure using identity graphs or probabilistic models. But many of these are backward-looking: They rely on post-campaign analysis or can’t intervene until after the ad has already been served.

That’s what makes Harmony Frequency from Innovid stand out. It flips the model by arming DSPs and publishers with pre-bid frequency intelligence across an advertiser’s entire media portfolio—before any money changes hands.

Powered by Innovid’s ad server, which sees every impression across publisher, platform, and device, Harmony Frequency allows marketers to avoid overexposing a household in the first place. They can elect to send frequency signals to the DSPs and publishers of their choice in order to real-time suppress overexposed audiences before bidding, reallocate spend to underexposed households, optimize delivery, and improve the viewing experience—all in the moment, not after the fact. 

It’s a fundamental shift: from reactive frequency control to proactive frequency intelligence and optimization.

Let’s talk real-world applications. What does frequency management look like when it’s done right?

Let’s take one of the leading global telcos.

The brand wanted to manage household frequency across all its ad buys—direct and programmatic—to improve efficiency and reduce waste. However, fragmentation made it nearly impossible to apply learnings from one buying channel to another.

That changed with the help of Innovid’s Harmony Frequency solution, which empowered Yahoo DSP to ingest household-level exposure data across the telco’s entire portfolio. Innovid acted as the central source of truth, feeding real-time signals to Yahoo’s bidding system to suppress overexposed households and maximize reach.

The results:

• +57% more effective impression capping 

• +41% increase in incremental household reach  

• Fewer wasted impressions, more efficient budget allocation, and less irritation for viewers

By bridging the gap between insight and action, the telco was able to turn frequency management into a strategic lever—rather than a post-campaign headache.

In a world of rising media costs and shrinking consumer patience, proactive frequency management isn’t optional. It’s essential. 

About Innovid 

Innovid is the leading independent ad tech platform, empowering marketers to create, deliver, measure, and optimize ad-supported experiences that people love. In 2025, Innovid and Flashtalking merged to create a transparent, scalable alternative to big-tech, walled-garden, and point solutions across CTV, digital, linear, and social channels. As part of Mediaocean, Innovid is tied into the industry’s core ad infrastructure for omnichannel planning, buying, and billing. Visit www.innovid.com to learn more.