Television
Two CTV environments account for 81.7 per cent of frequency-cap violations: mFilterIt
Smart-TV environments drive most frequency-cap violations, raising concerns over wasted ad spend
MUMBAI: What happens when the TV is switched off? According to a new investigation by mFilterIt, the screen may go dark, but ad activity could continue in the background.
The digital trust and ad-fraud intelligence platform has identified large-scale frequency-capping violations across Connected TV (CTV) environments, with two environments accounting for 81.7 per cent of all violations observed in its analysis.
One CTV environment alone accounted for 53.35 per cent of identified frequency-cap violations, while a second contributed another 28.35 per cent. mFilterIt said the concentration suggests the problem may be systemic rather than a collection of isolated incidents.
At the centre of the issue are proxy-sharing capabilities embedded in certain smart-TV app software development kits (SDKs). According to mFilterIt, these capabilities can allow background network activity to continue generating ad requests even when nobody is watching and, in some cases, when the TV screen is switched off.
While such requests can appear technically valid and result in impressions being counted, mFilterIt said they may not represent a genuine opportunity for an advertiser’s message to be seen.
“CTV has emerged as a premium inventory for advertisers because of its ability to combine the impact of television with the precision of digital,” said mFilterIt CEO and co-founder Amit Relan.
He said advertisers need to look beyond whether an ad call was successfully made or an impression was counted, particularly when the same device repeatedly generates impressions beyond expected viewing behaviour.
Frequency caps are designed to prevent advertisers from repeatedly showing the same ad to the same viewer and help campaigns reach incremental audiences.
When those limits are breached at the device level, mFilterIt said advertisers face two risks.
Reach can be inflated: Campaign dashboards may show wider audience delivery even though the same small group of devices is generating repeated impressions.
Budgets can be wasted: Each additional impression can be billed as an ad delivery, even when it may not represent a new viewer or a genuine viewing opportunity.
The company said a small number of compromised environments can therefore account for a disproportionate share of media spending while campaign reports continue to appear normal.
mFilterIt said restrictions on new app registrations linked to proxy-sharing capabilities and platform-level bans on residential proxy SDKs could help limit future abuse. However, it cautioned that policy changes alone cannot establish the quality of impressions advertisers have already purchased.
The company is calling for an independent validation layer that can assess CTV delivery at the impression level, including whether the viewing environment showed legitimate behaviour, whether device activity indicated a likely real viewer and whether individual devices repeatedly exceeded defined frequency thresholds.
It also wants advertisers to assess whether impressions represented genuine opportunities to view an ad and whether delivery contributed to incremental reach rather than repeated exposure to the same device.
mFilterIt is urging brands and agencies to move beyond served-and-counted impression metrics and adopt independent third-party validation, device-level frequency-cap enforcement, real-time anomaly monitoring and regular inventory audits.
For CTV advertising to command a premium, the company argues, the industry must establish not just that an impression was technically delivered, but that there was a credible viewer and a genuine opportunity for the ad to be seen.
