New MAGNA Study Proves that Repetition Breeds More than Annoyance

This study is the first of its kind and offers a warning to both brands and platforms to consider frequency windowing and a mix of creative throughout the campaign. “We know how important the ad experience is,” noted Kara Manatt, Executive Vice President Intelligence Solutions at MAGNA. “We often focus on the right message, right person and right time and those things are important. But the ad experience can really make or break an impression.”

Manatt explained that the viewer experience of overly repeated ads, especially within connected TV, is familiar. “We were really interested in what the impact was for our brands, the user experience and the platform,” she said. “No. 1 for us is how effective our ads are, and we knew that ad frequency played a role.”

“We knew ad frequency would have an effect on the viewer experience, but quantifying it was important,” added Karim Rayes, Chief Product Officer at Nexxen. “This is for us the first time we’re able to do that.”

The research was conducted in-house using experimental design with about 1250 online respondents. They were asked to view in their own homes and choose any content, thus replicating as typical a viewing experience as possible with MAGNA ads inserted and a questionnaire to follow. The results are sobering.

“Eighty-seven percent said that they usually experience this, so it’s happening all over and people remember it,” Manatt shared. Also, many believe that this high degree of ad frequency is intentional. “Even though we know in the industry that it is occurring, brands aren’t intending to deliver the same ad over and over in the same TV show,” she said. “But 68% think that brands specifically intend to do it.” Notably, this level of dissatisfaction was consistent across demographic groups and ages.

Another warning to advertisers and platforms is the impact of ad frequency on branding metrics. “Our clients and our agency are working to achieve greater impact on branding metrics like purchase intent, connection to and excitement about our brands,” Manatt explained. “To see that we are actually creating declines and having the opposite of the intended effect is pretty startling. We see a decline in purchase intent of 14%.”

“Customer experience is critical for the platform as well,” Rayes noted. “There is negative impact when the repeating ads were shown against the same content. Viewers want controls to properly manage that and often seek their content on another platform. CTV offers a lot more options than there used to be a few years ago. It’s critical for platforms to take this seriously as well.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, linear TV advertising is not as repetitive as other platforms. “Linear TV booking is done in advance and is very static,” Rayes said. “So, you’re carefully managing the amount of repetition you have against each show. When it comes to CTV and digital, you have a global budget, daily caps, etc. But overall, the distribution is not as polished. So, you can add on unless there are the right controls. You can end up in a situation where you’re going to repeat the same advertisement multiple times.”

When you add in user targeting and other factors on digital and start filtering down the number of available campaigns to a specific consumer, “you tend to narrow it down to the extent that you repeat the ads on the same consumer multiple times,” he added.

For Rayes, digital has its advantages, but optimizing ad frequency is one of the major challenges to be addressed.

For Manatt, “The research findings validate the importance of going the extra mile to ensure that ad over-frequency doesn’t happen. We’re already working with publishers, one on one, and with a short list of trusted partners like Nexxen who have the technology to manage frequency. So, we are already taking action. But these are important findings for us to share more broadly to make sure every team is taking advantage of that because it’s counter to what our ads are intending.”

She stressed that it is vital for the industry to work together on this issue. “We don’t want people changing their media behaviors and moving to something else because we’re not doing a good job of delivering our ads,” she said. “It’s not just an individual brand problem. It’s an industry wide problem and we all have a stake in it. Consumers can change the channel and switch platforms and spend their media time other places. We all need to work together on the right technology to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Looking ahead, there are some interesting and viable solutions. One, according to Manatt, is “storytelling … and using it to be more thoughtful. If we’re going to deliver multiple ads, hopefully not six in a TV show, we can use technology to tell a story from touch point to touch point.”

“It’s beyond the technology,” Rayes added. “It’s also working to establish industry standards. The ad serving platform hosting the creative might have the same creative but two different creative IDs for platform A to platform B. The broadcasters and platforms don’t know it’s the same ad. So even if you have the tools to say, ‘Okay, don’t show that ID more than three times,’ consumers may still see the same ad multiple times if there are two IDs with the same ad. It’s important that we have a universal language.

There are lots of standards in our space but there is still a lack of standards when it comes to creative management. It’s a work in progress,” he concluded.

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The opinions expressed here are the author’s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.