Frequency Capping

Frequency Capping prevents the same user from being hit with the same creative over and over. A typical cap might be three exposures per user per day, or ten exposures per user per week. Beyond the cap, the ad server simply declines to serve that creative to that user, saving budget for fresh reach and preventing the user-experience damage of high-frequency repetition.

Capping is trivially easy in digital environments where user identity is known (logged-in CTV, cookied browsers). It is harder in podcasting and streaming audio where identity resolution is less reliable, and nearly impossible in traditional broadcast where there is no per-listener identifier at all. The capabilities gap is one reason per-user frequency is easier to manage in CTV than in linear TV: and why addressable-TV technology matters so much to advertisers who care about wasted impressions.