Why Do I Always See the Same Ad While Streaming Videos?

Over the top streaming services like pluto.tv have completely changed the way tv content is delivered online. Plus, the success of the ad-supported subscription video-on-demand model has also been explored by streaming giants like YouTube and Hulu. There are platforms like P+ that offer a dedicated ad-supported tier at a discounted rate, and at the time of writing, even incumbent industry leaders like Netflix are exploring this new alternative pricing model. The trouble is, many people report having a rather uncomfortable experience when using streaming video apps. They see the same advertisements over and over again.

Considering the level of consumer dissatisfaction, brands should be keeping an eye on their ad frequency, but this requires an advertiser to really be paying attention to their work. It can be easy to miss. So why does this happen, and are there any ways to fix it?

Lost Control of Advertisement Inventory

One problem in the digital advertising business is that media owners have lost control of their ad inventory. Many publishers couldn’t tell you what ads are being sold to what businesses. Many businesses couldn’t tell you which sites they are running ads on.

Advertisements weren’t always bought like this though. In the past, most advertisements were purchased and sold by real people, reviewed, and then carefully placed alongside content.

Modern publishers use algorithms to manage auctions and determine which ads will run and which individual users will see those ads. But if you’ve spent much time watching streaming video online, you’ve probably had an experience getting the same ad over and over again. The truth is, when you look at the inventory of even major publishers, you’ll notice a lot of the same ad from the same company, or maybe just ads from the same industry again and again and again. Ad repetition is frustrating to users, because many times it isn’t even a matter of seeing a different ad for the same product from the same brand, but a matter of seeing the exact same ad.

Part of the reason for the lack of variation is that anyone can buy digital ads. There’s a very low barrier of entry for new players, and as a result, there’s also a lack of quality control across the exchanges.

The other issue is that big brand advertiser need to reach millions of people in order to be effective, and that requires low CPMs. This has created both a cheapening and commoditization of advertising units.

As a result, even though you might be seeing the same video over and over again, it might actually have been purchased on five different platforms and served to you on one streaming service–which makes it even more difficult for a brand to unwind.

DSPs and SSPs Buy and They Sell and They Buy and They Sell: Reselling Inventory

An SSP (or supply-side platform) is an ad tech platform that coordinates and manages the distribution and supply of advertisement inventories. SSPs help publishers and digital media owners sell ad space. They enable publishers to maximize the money they make running ads by connecting their inventory to a wide variety of demand-side platforms (DSPs) as well as different ad exchanges–marketplaces where brands can buy ads.

A publisher (someone running a website or blog) can maximize their earnings by allowing one of these platforms access to their inventory–extending the reach of the publisher’s impressions to as many potential brands as possible. In addition, these partnerships can help many new content creators take their first steps into developing monetization strategies for creators–which can often mean earning a living online for the first time.

The problem is that these middlemen often misrepresent themselves. One way SSPs do this is by misstating the publishers that they represent and the relationship they have with those publishers as it comes to the inventory they resell. Some platforms do this to meet requirements when they do not have enough inventory to fulfill an order.

When this happens, advertisements will get served to any available viewer–and not the carefully selected audience that a brand thinks it is speaking to. In addition to showing advertisements to people who aren’t interested in them, this can also mean that the same ad is placed into an ad break again and again and again.

Some brands intentionally take advantage of this by designing media plans that exclusively target remnant inventory, unsold ad units, in order to buy up as much of it as possible. This too can result in seeing the same video over and over.

Technical Problems

The tech stack of advertisers and publishers isn’t always up to date. Only the most cutting edge advertisers are able to associate what ad a customer sees with their customer information.

Additionally, as users can increasingly opt-out of legacy tracking technologies like cookies, block the loading of ad measurement scripts, or experience any number of issues that can cause key information like their customer ID to get separated from the data the brand keeps about their customers, it is becoming more difficult for brands to control their digital spending. While these changes have advantages for privacy, they also make it difficult for brands to monitor the performance of their advertising. In this case in particular, there simply isn’t a reliable way of showing how many times an individual customer has seen the same ad in every advertisement break.

Some content creators stitch their ads into their content and can thus reach users who block advertisements. It is particularly common amongst podcasters and other listener-supported media channels. An unintentional consequence of this can be that the ad-blocking user who opted out of cookies becomes untraceable and gets hit with the same ad multiple times. Other times, it might mean that an ad is exposed to the same user over and over again because the brand has bought up a wide variety of overlapping publishing opportunities. A great example of this is Audible, which has supported so many podcasts that many podcasters consider receiving an Audible promo code a rite of passage and a sign of ‘making it’ in the industry.

When advertisers and publishers use outdated technology, they do more than annoy their customers. They expose the data of the people who are trusting their business to tremendous risk. Newer ad tech platforms have begun to address these problems, but it is going to take a long time for these sorts of solutions to be adopted by the industry as big and decentralized as the digital content industry is.

Lacking the Human Touch

Repetitive advertisements were not often an issue on linear television networks because they were bought and sold differently than today’s digital ads. While some digital ads are also purchased directly (for example, YouTube Masthead ads) for the most part, brands can buy digital ads directly–without ever talking to anyone at the publisher. When it comes to TV ads, brand and publisher teams work closely together, and nearly every advertisement is scheduled to the second ahead of time. This approach has a number of advantages and disadvantages, but one positive is that it prevents a single brand from monopolizing all of the available ad slots.

Online advertisements, on the other hand, are just more complicated. You can run ads on top of countless on-demand streams. More people are creating digital content today than at any other point in human history.

As a result, some streaming devices do not schedule ad spots but sell campaigns based on the number of impressions a brand wants to receive. If the number of viewers on the streaming service is less than the number of impressions, the platform might keep showing the same advertisement until the contracted impressions count is reached. It means that the same person will see the same advertisement multiple times.

While streaming services and advertisers can limit any advertisement, this might mean a higher cost per impression. It means that brands need to justify the added ‘expense’ of showing an ad to a smaller number of people–and the best way to do that is by having an ad that is effective at driving customers to take action. The trouble is, the only action someone who is annoyed is likely to take is deciding not to do business with that brand anymore.

What Can Be Done About It?

Believe it or not, there isn’t actually very much we, the public, can do to fix this problem. We need brands to step up and take control over their media buys. We need ad agencies to audit the performance reports of their campaigns closely. We need politicians and regulators to take the changing digital landscape seriously, and enact modern protections for consumer privacy rights. We need the DSPs and SSPs who care about the publishers they represent to have the same access to brands that some of the platforms that have created this problem enjoy. We need streaming platforms to start considering the ads their customers watch as an essential part of the viewing experience.

But this doesn’t mean that you’re out of options. A number of ad platforms include the Ad Choice reporting standard, which you might notice as a small transparent mark in the upper or lower right-hand corner of an ad. Clicking this element will allow you to report an ad you’re seeing over and over again, and oftentimes these reports can help an advertiser detect a problem they may not even know.

More often than not, the business whose ad you are seeing, again and again, doesn’t even know it is happening. Let them know! They may be able to make a change that fixes the problem and will appreciate the heads up.