The news: Samsung Ads Canada teamed up with delivery platform Skip to show the benefits of reducing audience duplication, per a press release.

By cutting duplication by 25% for a March 2026 campaign, Skip was able to extend incremental reach to 200,000 net-new households—an 18% increase compared with 7% for legacy targeting methods. Cost per unique reach was also reduced by 43%.

Why it matters: The “duplication tax” is both wasting ad spend and preventing marketers from reaching new audiences.

CTV marketers rarely spot duplicate household views, which insidiously drains their budgets. Worse yet, the opportunity cost (all the fresh households they missed) doubles the pain and urgency to solve the problem.

CTV’s granular, episode-level targeting is powerful, but marketers also need tools that directly address duplication, as evidenced by Skip. Maximizing reach while rooting out waste will in turn bolster the impact of higher ad relevance. Mastering this balance is essential as US CTV ad spend climbs to $47.56 billion and surpasses linear by 2028, per our forecasts.

Some duplication is worth paying for—if it drives higher engagement in a world of distracted viewers. With second-screen viewing on the rise, a single ad view may not cut through the noise. Running additional placements increases the odds of true engagement, so marketers should carefully balance waste reduction with deliberate frequency to maximize impact.

Implications for marketers: Eliminating duplication across saturated CTV environments will be challenging, but the reach gains are worth the effort. Marketers must work with tech partners that can offer deterministic cross-platform measurement and treat purely predictive tools with skepticism until they can consistently prove results.

At the same time, marketers need to balance reach and ad frequency to contend with second-screen viewing. Over 40% of consumers report frustration from repetitive ads in a single sitting, per Omnicom. Deploying creative variations in ads may be the optimal strategy if budgets can support it.

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