Frequency capping
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
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 all the channels can supply. AdBuyMCP's exposure ledger is built for exactly that, on four keys of decreasing precision. Being exact about its state: the spine is designed, schema-backed and unit-tested, and is currently fed only by the deterministic sandbox — a live report proves aggregate delivery, not household exposure, so the system refuses to mint identities from it.
Goes deeper: Four verbs, kept apart
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
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 — an opaque household key, a hashed advertising id, a consent-based id, or a postcode sector — with per-key legal grading.
Household graph
A dataset linking devices, identifiers and addresses believed to belong to the same household, allowing a television, a laptop and a phone in one home to be recognised as one buying unit.
More on targeting and identity
How an audience is described to a seller, and how much of the description survives. Most of the honest difficulty in media buying lives here.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through