Targeting and identity
What is frequency capping?
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what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
Almost every platform caps within itself and almost none caps across sellers, which is why a multi-channel plan quietly overexposes the same households. Capping across channels requires one exposure record keyed on something every channel can supply. AdBuyMCP's exposure ledger is built for exactly that, on four keys of decreasing precision. The ledger is built, and labelled sample data is its only source today. A live report proves aggregate delivery, and household exposure needs a key with consent behind it, so AdBuyMCP does not create identities from a report. That is why an AdBuyMCP awareness plan states its 3, 5 or 12 times a week as planned frequency.
Why does a per-platform cap fail across channels?
Each platform caps within its own inventory and cannot see the others. A plan on four channels with a cap of four on each allows up to sixteen exposures for a household that appears on all of them.
The combined reach in a report is inflated by the same overlap, because adding each channel's reach counts those households once per channel. Launches suffer most, because a launch buys the same people repeatedly across channels by design.
What does cross-channel capping need?
It needs one exposure record that every channel writes into, keyed on something all of them can supply. AdBuyMCP's ledger uses four keys: an opaque household key, a hashed advertising id, a consent-based id, and a postcode sector, which is the coarsest and always available. Cinema and DOOH usually land on the postcode sector.
Hashed advertising ids are held for at most 90 days and then stripped from the event, which re-grades it to a coarser key and keeps the record. Resolution between key spaces happens in one module only, the key-translation service.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Frequency
The average number of times the people in an audience see an advert in a period, usually a week or a whole campaign. It is impressions divided by the people reached, so it describes the audience on average and says nothing certain about any one person.
Deduplication
Removing the double-counting that occurs when the same person is reached by more than one channel or placement in a campaign, so that combined reach reflects distinct people rather than the sum of each channel's separate count.
Reach
The number of distinct people or households exposed to a campaign at least once, as opposed to the total number of impressions delivered. Usually expressed as a count or as a percentage of a defined universe.
Exposure ledger
A single record of advertising exposures across every channel, keyed on whichever of four identifiers a channel can supply, with per-key legal grading. They are an opaque household key, a hashed advertising id, a consent-based id and a postcode sector.
same group
These terms are also in Targeting and identity
How an audience is described to a seller, and how much of the description survives. Most media-buying problems start at this translation step.