Three twos make six

Three platforms, three reports, three frequencies of two.

Add up the reach and the plan looks disciplined. Nobody is being hammered. Every cap is respected. The team reports a light, well-mannered campaign.

Then picture the person on the other end of it. One evening, one sofa, one phone that becomes a laptop that becomes a television. They saw the same ad six times before they went to bed, and possibly a seventh on the way home. That number exists nowhere. No report contains it, because every channel counts only itself and considers the job done.

This is the thing I find hardest to explain in a planning meeting. A frequency cap is not a promise to the customer. It is a promise inside one system, about one system's own delivery, and the customer does not live inside one system. They live in an evening.

From the platform side you can watch what six does. The first exposure earns a look. The second earns recognition. Somewhere around the fourth the ad stops being information and becomes a fact about the brand: this company is following me. Nobody clicks it, nobody remembers it kindly, and the cost per thousand does not rise to warn anyone.

An honest version of the number takes fifteen minutes and no tools. Take the reach and the impressions each platform reports for the same week. Add the impressions. Divide by the largest single reach figure, not by the sum of them. It will not be exact. It will be closer than two.

The minute belongs to the person, not to the channel that bought it. Whatever they gave you, they gave once. So the cap belongs to them as well, and if nobody owns it across the whole plan, nobody has set it at all.