The news: Omnicom Media and Disney Advertising launched a streaming ad solution to improve frequency management and reduce repetitive ads.

• The offering combines Disney’s content and Audience Graph, Omnicom’s Acxiom identity capabilities, and Innovid’s creative sequencing tech to help serve different ads to connected TV (CTV) viewers depending on where they are in the campaign journey.
• It allows advertisers to offer a series of complementary—but different—messaging, ranging from 15 to 60 seconds, that build on one another to tell a story.

For video-on-demand (VOD) activations, Disney Advertising is using AI and machine learning to analyze programming content to provide marketers with contextual data.

The capability is live now in the US, and access will be available in the EU and Latin America later this year.

Why it matters: Repetitive ads can contribute to ad fatigue, user churn, and negative brand perceptions. By adding sequential ad messaging to both premade and live programming, brands can better attract and retain viewers of long-form events—like the FIFA World Cup or awards shows—and avoid annoying viewers with repetitive advertising.

• 62% of US consumers with a streaming subscription report seeing the same ad multiple times in one session on streaming platforms, per Omnicom.
• 43% say repeated ads in a single sitting on the same platform are very frustrating.

The bigger picture: Solutions controlling the variety of ads that users experience could improve advertiser efficacy and become more crucial as streaming platforms consolidate and as marketers look for more ways to manage ad exposure, creative sequencing, and engagement across CTV environments.

Rather than optimizing solely on impressions or reach, agencies are beginning to optimize the creative journey itself. That grows more streamlined as AI makes generating multiple variants cheaper.

Recommendations for marketers: Reducing ad repetition is valuable, but another opportunity lies in designing campaigns where each exposure advances the story.

• Develop campaigns with multiple creative variants from the outset.
• Use earlier exposures to build brand awareness, follow-up ads to highlight product benefits, and later impressions to introduce a call to action.
• Prioritize sequential storytelling during high-viewership, long-form events to capitalize on opportunities for narrative-based creative that keeps audiences engaged.