Why can targeted advertising be smart enough to show me ads at home for something I searched on my PC at work, but not smart enough to not show me the same ad 10x in a row or for services for which I’ve already subscribed?
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There’s a setting an advertiser can set called a Frequency Cap, which is basically exactly meant to address this. How many times do you want a given user to be able to see your ad per day/week/quarter? You can set a specific amount. Now why are you still being bombarded? It could be a few possibilities:
1. The brand were too inexperienced/lazy to set up frequency caps. For example, I tend to see this issue most with mom & pops like a local restaurant. They probably set up their ads themselves but have no idea what a frequency cap is
2. Your device (e.g. an iPhone) or your browser (e.g. Firefox with certain settings) is limiting tracking and/or cookies. So they may be fully intending to only serve you 3 ads a day, but your tech stack is fooling the ad exchanges into thinking you are a fresh new person more frequently than that
3. The frequency caps are set not at the brand level, but at the publisher or tactic level. For example, you get 3 display ads before you hit your cap but oh wait here come the video ads well thankfully those are over JUST KIDDING you went to ESPN.com and the brand has a direct partnership with them and they aren’t tracking anything that didn’t happen on their network so they have their own cap
4. Similar to #3, the caps might be at the campaign level rather than the brand. So from your POV you might be thinking “holy crap Doritos get off my back” but in the back end Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch, a Doritos/Mountain Dew collab, etc. all have separate campaigns set up, and each of those campaigns have separate caps
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