How the Industry Is Working to Reduce Ad Fatigue in CTV
Seeing the same ad multiple times during a streaming session is one of the most frustrating experiences for viewers. It also represents a problem for advertisers, agencies, and platforms, which need to manage campaign frequency in an ecosystem involving numerous tech vendors.
One of the root causes lies in how ad creatives are identified. A single ad can pass through multiple ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, and streaming services. Each system may assign it its own internal identifier, resulting in the exact same creative having different references across the supply chain. This makes it difficult for different players to recognize that they are handling the same ad and account for exposures accumulated in other environments.
The outcome affects both the viewer experience and campaign management, particularly when advertising is distributed across multiple CTV services and video platforms.
Back in August 2025, we covered the Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF) on tvads, an IAB Tech Lab initiative designed to establish a unique, persistent identification system for ad creatives. In that article, we explained how it works, the role of UniversalAdID and authorized registries, and the potential it offered for improving campaign management and measurement in CTV environments.
Since then, the issue warrants a fresh look. Common creative identification is not merely a technical enhancement or a matter of standardization. It can also help address everyday streaming ad challenges, such as excessive ad repetition when a campaign spans multiple platforms and ad systems.
While the initiative now has a defined technical framework, its effectiveness hinges on something far more complex: ensuring that participants across the ad supply chain adopt and use these mechanisms in an interoperable way. What is the industry doing to move in that direction, and how far has adoption progressed?
Ad repetition is not just a subjective perception among viewers. A 2023 study by MAGNA Media Trials and Nexxen revealed that 87% of streaming viewers felt they saw the exact same ads far too often. The research also highlighted that after six exposures to the same creative within a single hour, purchase intent dropped by 16%.
The issue also has a major operational dimension. According to IAB's 2024 video research, only 14% of TV and video buyers registered all of their creatives.
In this context, establishing mechanisms that allow creatives to be identified consistently becomes an essential step toward improving interoperability across video advertising.
One of the key initiatives tackling this issue is the Ad Creative ID Framework (ACIF), developed by IAB Tech Lab through its Advanced TV Working Group.
The first official version, ACIF v1.0, was released in March 2025 alongside its validation API specification. Its goal is to ensure that an ad creative retains a persistent identifier throughout all stages of the video distribution chain, regardless of the systems involved in the process.
The framework relies on unique identifiers assigned by authorized ad registries. These registries maintain the metadata associated with each ad unit and enable supply chain participants to query and validate its identity. To achieve this, ACIF includes a directory to locate the relevant registry and an API that standardizes queries and metadata retrieval.
A crucial component of the framework is UniversalAdID, a mechanism built into VAST 4.0 that allows the creative identifier to be passed alongside the reference of the issuing registry. This enables downstream systems receiving the ad to identify not only its code, but also where to verify it. Furthermore, the VAST CTV Addendum 2024 extends this capability to legacy VAST versions, facilitating adoption in environments where multiple standard versions still coexist.
This backward compatibility is particularly vital in CTV, where ads traverse vastly different infrastructures and platforms before reaching the end-user player. Maintaining persistent identification along that path makes it easier for systems to recognize the same creative and leverage its metadata across decisioning, measurement, and ad management processes.
Although ACIF establishes a common framework to identify ad creatives, its scope also comes with certain limitations. One major challenge revolves around dynamic advertising or Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), which generates customized ad variations based on variables such as location, audience profile, context, or device capabilities.
In these scenarios, a single campaign can produce multiple creative variations, adjusting specific elements of the messaging or visual content. This introduces an additional layer of complexity when identifying distinct variants and defining how they relate to one another—especially when changes alter the actual ad content.
IAB Tech Lab's own documentation notes that DCO is not currently supported as a dedicated feature in ACIF v1.0. For non-DCO related creatives, the framework does allow registering a base asset and establishing parent-child relationships between different versions.
Conversely, when the exact same creative is adapted for different formats or resolutions via transcoding, generating a new ID is not required: the same UniversalAdID can be retained.
This distinction is crucial because it highlights that creative identification is far from straightforward in an increasingly automated and personalized ad ecosystem. While ACIF provides a standardized framework to identify ad assets, edge cases like dynamic creative generation still demand tailored criteria and specialized solutions.
The development of ACIF does not rely solely on IAB Tech Lab. For the framework to succeed, it also requires active participation from organizations that register creatives, as well as ad tech vendors that must integrate these identifiers into their systems.
In the United States, AD-ID has provided a centralized registration and identification system for ad assets for years. In the UK, Clearcast plays a prominent role in identifying and clearing TV ads, while in France, initiatives led by ARPP and EdiPub serve similar functions. These organizations are central to efforts aimed at improving cross-registry interoperability and expanding the use of recognizable identifiers across different markets.
To support this effort, IAB Tech Lab launched a dedicated working group: the ACIF Ad Registry Task Force. Its goal is to foster collaboration between ad registries and technology providers while streamlining the adoption of the validation API. The involvement of entities like AD-ID, Clearcast, and ARPP is particularly significant, as it helps bridge legacy identification systems that have historically operated in isolation.
Progress is also visible among ad platforms. Google Ad Manager documents compatibility with identifiers from registries such as AD-ID, Clearcast, and ARPP, allowing these references to be passed and managed within its video workflows. Display & Video 360 (DV360) similarly supports these registry IDs within its creative management API.
Meanwhile, FreeWheel has participated in IAB Tech Lab initiatives and working sessions around ACIF, contributing to industry education and outreach alongside other market leaders.
However, it is important to distinguish these preliminary steps from full-scale standard adoption. Supporting UniversalAdID or accepting specific registry IDs is a key milestone, but ACIF also encompasses metadata validation, querying mechanisms, and deeper interoperability that require dedicated technical integration.
Having a common identifier makes it easier for platforms to recognize the same creative, but on its own, it does not guarantee that ad frequency will be controlled effectively. To achieve this, advertisers must register their assets, agencies and ad operations teams must preserve their identifiers, and tech vendors must transmit and process them throughout the entire ad delivery path.
Responsibility, therefore, does not fall on a single player. The framework's efficacy hinges on every link in the ad chain integrating these mechanisms into their workflows and preventing identifiers from being dropped or replaced by internal references that obscure the original creative.
One of the primary challenges in CTV advertising is achieving effective frequency management when a single campaign is distributed across multiple streaming platforms. A viewer may encounter the same ad across different services, even as each platform independently manages its own impressions and campaign frequency limits.
This issue, known as cross-platform frequency capping, underscores the difficulty of controlling ad exposure beyond the boundaries of a single platform. While an individual service may successfully cap how many times it displays a creative within its own environment, it lacks visibility into exposures that same viewer has already accumulated on other streaming services.
In this context, ACIF can play a vital role. By providing a persistent identifier for each creative, it enables participants across the ad ecosystem to recognize that they are handling the exact same ad, even when it travels through disparate platforms and ad delivery systems.
However, identifying a creative is not the same as identifying a viewer, nor does it automatically track how many times that viewer has seen the ad. Achieving true cross-platform frequency capping also requires coordination mechanisms, measurement solutions, and identity signals that link exposures together—all while complying with applicable privacy regulations.
Therefore, ACIF alone is not a plug-and-play solution for cross-platform frequency capping. Rather, it delivers a foundational building block required to move toward a more coordinated approach to frequency management in CTV.
ACIF now boasts a definitive specification and backed support from key organizations and companies actively working to drive implementation. However, its rollout still faces significant hurdles: expanding adoption across the entire ad ecosystem, ensuring identifiers are preserved throughout distribution, and addressing complex scenarios like dynamic creative optimization and cross-platform frequency capping.
The standard provides a vital technical foundation toward greater interoperability in video advertising. Its true potential will now hinge on whether advertisers, agencies, ad registries, and tech vendors manage to incorporate it in a coordinated way across their daily workflows.
At tvads we has a professional team able to advise you on this field and and guide you in any area of your streaming advertising business, advising you or even operating it on your behalf if necessary
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