For anyone who has ever endured seeing the same ad over and over again when watching an on-demand TV program, here's welcome news: ad tech provider BlackArrow has introduced a new audience-based frequency capping feature that enables advertisers to manage the number of times an ad is seen by a unique household, audience segment or device. The feature is part of the newest release of the BlackArrow Advanced Advertising System.

Frequency capping has become a bigger issue as audiences fragment their viewing across multiple devices, particularly mobile, which, according to various research, now accounts for 30-50% of views for some content providers. These behaviors have made it difficult for advertisers to accurately gauge how often their ad is seen because mobile devices only have browser-based cookies and pay-TV set-top boxes can't run cookies at all.

BlackArrow's frequency-capping feature solves for these challenges by leveraging the company's data management platform, BlackArrow Audience, with an approach that's comparable to server-side cookies. Before an ad is delivered, the ad server checks the count in order to adhere to the frequency policy. The advertiser can set the frequency within a particular time period by audience segment, household or device.

Frequency capping is especially important given the trend toward binge-viewing. As a dedicated binge-viewer of many TV programs, I've frequently been dismayed by the repetitiveness of the same ad (I'm guessing many of you have had the same experience). Since I'm familiar with the industry, I typically chalk these instances up to the relative immaturity of video-on-demand advertising. But I do sometimes wonder what the average viewer thinks.