Ad fatigue is real, and frequency caps alone won’t save your brand

New Delhi: It’s time to satisfy your content appetite and watch a video that has been sitting in your watchlist for a while. You start watching it, and during the entirety of the video, you see the same ad seven times (unless you have the bucks for premium). Feeling irritated? You are not alone. 

In the age of hyper-targeting and real-time bidding, it turns out that one thing ads are really good at is repeating themselves. 

Ad fatigue and frequency overload continue to be one of digital advertising’s most persistent headaches. No matter the adtech stacks, frequency capping tools, data clean rooms, or granular analytics, audiences often find themselves being pestered with the same ad multiple times. Ad fatigue, of late, looks like a strategic liability. 

Now, marketers are realising that solving ad fatigue won’t come from another line of code or the addition of another dashboard. Rather, it will come from creative empathy, cross-platform thinking, and planning that remembers there is a human on the other side of the screen. 

Capping is not enough

Fueling the train of thought, Venke Sharma, a seasoned marketing strategist, said, “Despite all the noise around ad frequency capping, there’s just not enough being done. Not enough experiments. Not enough investment.”

While frequency caps are widely used, Sharma warned that they’re often misapplied or misunderstood. “Simply putting a frequency cap is not enough. You need to think about the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to conversion, and rotate creatives accordingly. That’s the only way to make frequency meaningful,” said Sharma. 

He pointed to a larger philosophical flaw in how marketers treat repetition. “We’ve had frequency capping for 20–22 years. But the space keeps evolving. Today, platforms like Meta and Google don’t share full exposure data. Without that, your hands are tied. You need to use probabilistic attribution, predictive modelling, and real-time optimisation,” he stated. 

Sharma was particularly critical of brands that treat creatives like a static asset. “This is when fatigue sets in. And if you’re tracking only at the end of the campaign, it is too late,” he said. 

Sharma further suggested, “But if you’re watching in real time, click-through rates dropping, CPAs rising, you can act immediately. Change ad elements. Optimise visuals. Use UGC and influencer content. Keep it fresh.”

Angel investor Prabhakar Tiwari also stressed the need for diverse, rotating messaging. “Dynamic creative refresh cycles (every 7–10 days)” are now essential, he said, along with audience segmentation and suppression to avoid bombarding the same users.

Outlining the broader approach, Tiwari said, “Social platforms (Meta, YouTube) have native frequency controls, but for programmatic and cross-platform efforts, we need to sync exposure caps through a unified ad server supplemented by exclusion lists for recent converters. A typical target is 3–5 exposures per week per user, adjusted by funnel stage and campaign length.”

But caps aren’t enough. Emphasising on it, Tiwari suggested story story-driven ad journey-teaser, followed by a demo, and then a testimonial, to reduce repetition. “Increased collaboration is critical. The wall between media and creative is gone in effective campaigns,” he said, advocating for tighter collaboration between media and creative teams. 

Systematic slips

For Pawan Sarda, Chief Growth Officer at The House of Abhinandan Lodha, the issue often begins with the way algorithms behave. 

“The way the system works, it keeps looking for the right audience. And the most engaged audiences tend to see the ad a lot more often. After a point, repeating the same message to the same person has no impact. There’s simply no value in hammering the same ad again and again,” he explained. 

To curb this, Sarda, aligned with the other two experts, suggested creating multiple creatives. 

“You have your main message, and then you have recall communications, designed to reinforce the idea without feeling repetitive. We might start with a 30-second video and then break it down into 10-second or shorter versions to keep it dynamic and more suited to the platform and viewer attention span,” he said. 

Sarda added, “These days, it’s not just about advertising, it’s also about content. We try to strike a balance. That blend helps keep the messaging fresh while still delivering what we want the consumer to remember.”

Having said that, Sarda also challenged the assumption that repeating messages always leads to fatigue. “Creative fatigue is just that - fatigue,” he said. “If you look at older advertising, brands used to run the same message for years. Take Nirma, for example. It ran the same ad for over a decade,” he said.

What’s different now, he believes, is not message consistency, but its relentless, automated delivery. “How things work now is if you’re shown the same message over and over again, on your phone, every time you open an app, it creates fatigue.”

Still, he acknowledged the limits of tech solutions. “There are advertisers who actually want a frequency of 25 or even 30. Even if the creative isn’t great, even if the ad itself isn’t that good, the audience has no choice but to register it,” he revealed. 

Tool toggle

Archana Aggarwal, Media Consultant at Archimedius - the Media Navigator, shared that despite brands setting frequency caps, typically 3 to 7 per user, platform execution often overshoots. 

“At least one platform almost always exceeds this limit. You often find frequencies shooting up beyond 10, especially when the cohort size is small or niche. They’ll tell you, ‘We delivered within 3 to 5,’ but when you look at audit reports or user feedback, it often feels much higher,” she said.

She also pointed to sponsorship-based media buying models, especially on Connected TV, as a frequent culprit. “During the IPL, if you opt for a fixed spot buy instead of CPM, frequency caps may not apply. You end up seeing the same ad repeatedly because the buy is based on slots, not impressions,” Aggarwal told BestMediaInfo.com.  

To counter this, Aggarwal suggested using tools like IAS, MOAT, mFilterIT, and their ilk to monitor frequency violations and traffic quality. According to her, one-off incidents are still acceptable. But persistent issues “call for clear conversations, and even budget pullbacks, if necessary.” 

Shubhranshu Singh, Chief Marketing Officer – CVBU, Tata Motors, sees potential in technologies like household graphs and universal IDs to reduce overexposure, since, according to him, tools like clean rooms and data fusion models are only partial fixes. 

However, he is clear-eyed about the current limitations. “Until such systems are widely adopted, consumers will continue to be bombarded by the same creative, on multiple screens, often within the same hour,” he said. 

He also highlighted that the entire media ecosystem is structurally flawed when it comes to frequency control. “In today’s omnichannel media ecosystem, where consumers toggle between platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Amazon, and CTV apps in a matter of minutes, the problem of repetitive ads has intensified. Each platform is engineered to manage frequency within its own silo, never accounting for what’s happening elsewhere – the Walled Gardens,” Singh noted.