Frequency vs. Fatigue: Finding the Sweet Spot in Advertising
The 2024 election didn’t just redefine the political landscape; it redefined how campaigns connect with voters. In a year dominated by streaming, one thing is clear: reach and frequency aren’t just metrics and must be the backbone of effective political advertising, especially in CTV. To understand this on a deeper level, our team set out to uncover how reach and frequency metrics in political advertising shape effective campaign strategies.
Given the limited availability of other key metrics in CTV and the fragmented nature of CTV viewership, along with the limitations in tracking individual-level data, reach and frequency have become crucial proxies for understanding campaign effectiveness. We know when it comes to election ads, campaigns can’t afford to leave a single voter behind — making accurate digital measurement that shows the impact of their ad programs in the real world all the more important.
In collaboration with our partners and internal data science team, we posed the age-old question in political advertising: How many times do we need to reach an individual with a CTV ad for it to be efficient and effective?
The challenge lies in finding a balanced approach. If the audience sees your message too few times, it can result in low ad recall and brand awareness. Conversely, if they see it too many times, it can lead to audience annoyance, wasted budget, and fatigue from excessive exposure.
Together, we set out to identify that optimal frequency — i.e. the “sweet spot” — where ad exposure maximizes impact on CTV without wasted spend, effectively balancing effectiveness and efficiency. Ultimately, this will help our clients make better-informed strategy decisions during key campaign moments. Our team defined this “sweet spot” as the point where CTV ad exposure maximizes campaign impact, such as reach, conversions, or subscriptions, without over-delivering or resulting in wasted spend.
Recent industry analysis highlights the complexity of political ad effectiveness and frequency. Nearly half of voters believe that repetitive ads worsen their perception of a candidate, especially among undecided or dissatisfied voters. Additionally, frequency challenges vary by demographic groups, with audiences aged 50+ being overexposed, while younger audiences report seeing far fewer ads. Our research builds on these insights to identify optimal frequency thresholds that maximize voter engagement while minimizing fatigue.
We analyzed 83 campaigns with a median duration of approximately four weeks across varying budgets at the IP level. This detailed analysis helped us understand how factors such as campaign length and budget influence the optimal frequency, diminishing returns, and audience engagement. Leveraging this data allows us to craft more effective and cost-efficient strategies, maximizing impact while managing spend for future campaigns.
Ultimately, our findings indicate that the optimal weekly frequency is approximately seven times, suggesting a standard media planning strategy focused on awareness and persuasion. However, during short, high-impact windows such as GOTV, higher frequencies may be appropriate to maximize impact and call voters to action.
Additionally, our findings showed that weekly optimal frequency does not always increase with the duration or budget of a campaign. While higher-frequency exposure may generate additional impressions each week, it doesn’t necessarily translate into an incremental audience reach.
While these findings align with conventional wisdom, they underscore the importance of implementing secondary strategies that enable campaigns to continue reaching prospective voters once the ceiling of the original audience is reached.
From an ongoing tactical perspective, our goal is to strike a balance between budget, audience, and frequency, finding that sweet spot where spending still drives new reach without wasting resources. Once a campaign reaches its optimal frequency, ads primarily reach the same audience, making it less effective for expanding to new voters.
To drive the most impact and make the most of your budget, we can implement strategic tactics to both engage persuadable voters and maximize spending efficiency:
1) Go Beyond CTV to Reach Remaining Voters
If your campaign is reaching 80% of the audience through CTV, what about the other 20%? To maximize reach, campaigns should open media buys to incorporate pre-roll digital video, mobile, and other complementary media channels, helping to connect with potential voters who may not be accessible through CTV alone. Additionally, layering in a mobile strategy like AdMessenger can further reinforce your CTV messaging to amplify impact across devices and capture audiences wherever they are. A well-rounded media strategy ensures no voter is left behind.
2) Turn Data Insights into New Audiences
By partnering with our data science team and tapping into the power of our Audience Insights dashboard, we can build smarter, more efficient targeting strategies. By leveraging household-level data and deduplicating audiences, we can identify where key voter segments are spending their time, allowing us to create optimized audiences that drive impact and eliminate wasted impressions.
Leading up to the 2024 general election, we partnered with a PAC advertiser aiming to reach Democratic voters with critical messaging around Middle East issues. Our top priority was maximizing the impact of our program against the PAC’s first-party list, but we found ourselves in need of creative targeting solutions to really drive the client’s message home in the final few weeks before the general election.
To identify additional Middle East-focused Democratic voters, our team of data scientists leveraged exclusive audience insights made possible through our partnership with i24, an international 24-hour news channel based in Tel Aviv. We identified 40% of i24 News viewers to build a unique audience list. We then created a lookalike of the advertiser’s first-party list, excluded already-targeted households, and layered in third-party voter file data to ensure true incremental reach.
This approach increased their targetable audience by 3.1 million households before Election Day, resulting in a meaningful shift in key states compared to similar neighboring states. This creative approach to incremental reach, made possible through our partnerships, allows us to uniquely identify and activate niche audiences, providing targeted reach that only our unique data capabilities can deliver. Learn more here.
3) Refine Messaging and Targeting
Once you’ve expanded your audience strategy by leveraging third-party data, lookalike modeling, ACR, and set-top box data to identify new voters, it’s key to refine messaging for real-time impact. In the fast-moving political landscape, where news travels quickly and election dynamics shift in real time, tracking campaign performance beyond impressions is essential.
Measuring true engagement and lift can make sure your campaign isn’t just reaching voters but driving action and making every media dollar count. Nimble partners allow campaigns to respond quickly to real-time events, swapping out messaging to stay relevant and responsive. Working alongside trusted partners who can provide accurate, deduplicated household and voter data allows you to connect media strategy directly to measurable impact, closing the loop between planning and performance.
Additional strategies in the final days of the campaign, such as investing in high-impact CTV opportunities like live sports and prime-time slots, can help reach new voters effectively. Additionally, employing contextual targeting, especially when first-party lists are fully utilized, can maximize reach and ensure no voter is left unaddressed. It’s important not to pull back on your campaign, opening up an opportunity for your opponent to move in on those audiences.
By leveraging our powerful, proprietary dataset available exclusively through our cable footprint and layering different targeting methods, we can expand your reach and impact. Our team can demonstrate the true impact of your strategies with deduplicated reach and frequency reporting, cross-device targeting, and incremental reach analysis. We help you learn from campaign successes, identify areas for improvement, and significantly boost voter contact to prove how a strategic mix of proven tactics drives greater overall effectiveness.
Ultimately, the 2024 election highlighted the importance of managing reach and frequency in CTV political advertising. With limited tracking and fragmented viewership, these metrics are key to maximizing impact without causing voter fatigue. As audiences reach saturation, expanding into new channels and refining targeting are crucial for continued engagement.
Using cross-channel measurement, sequential messaging, and contextual targeting helps balance reach and frequency, ensuring efficient media spend and stronger campaign results in a complex media environment. Ultimately, adopting these strategies can improve campaign effectiveness and voter connection in an increasingly multiscreen world.
Disclaimer: We acknowledge the limitations of data and that, given the 2024 campaigns available for this study, the data included in this study skews slightly to the left.