Repeating Ad

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• Woe to those watching television during any election season, for they will have this trope forced upon them ten thousandfold, as the FCC requires all broadcast stations they've issued licenses for to air political ads, even attack ads. Every station break with room for local spots is usually bought up during this time by candidates, special interest groups and political PACs, who produce one or two ads and then blanket the airwaves with them on every channel. It's not just television that has this; this trope is widespread on the internet and nearly every other YouTube video will usually begin with one ad of this nature.
• During commercial breaks of the 2010-11 C1 UEFA Champions League final (Barcelona v. Manchester United) broadcast on the Vietnamese network VTV3, a rather noisy 5-second advertisement^Translation(crash) "Kangaroo! The leading water purifier of Vietnam." of the water purifier company Kangaroo was played a total of 54 times — at least once, it played 7 times in a row. After this one-night ad campaign, the company's revenue increased fivefold.
• TBS, when it was originally a superstation beaming around the country from Atlanta, relied on a ton of repeating ads, mostly for Ginsu knives, Slim Whitman records, and other products. (The legend goes that the proceeds from the sales of Slim Whitman records were what Ted Turner used to make payroll during the earliest days of CNN. Another tale was that the sales department had a storage closet full of Ginsu knives and the other stuff they hawked during ad breaks; some employees proceeded to fill a crate full of this and other Southern stuff, and ship it off to some British engineers who'd helped them install an audio console; the FedEx customs people were bemused, and the British guys absolutely loved it, especially the Moon Pies they'd tossed in there.)
• During showings of Groundhog Day on TV, it is common to show the same commercial six times in a row for every ad break, or have every ad break consist of the same six commercials. (If you haven't seen the movie, just read up on the trope named after the film to understand.) The AMC repeat marathon in 2023 also played the same bumper for the film three times in a row.
• In Swordfish, when one of the characters is stopped after cutting through customs, his lawyer claims that he "didn't want to miss Survivor." During one TV screening, the next ad break after this scene started with an ad for Survivor, even going so far as to show the film winding back to the line in the film. The result was this with only one ad.
• This also happens when the station messes up airing a commercial, due to their need to air the whole commercial to satisfy their advertisers. If the station accidentally starts Commercial B too soon, cutting Commercial A short, you can rest assured Commercial B will be followed by Commercial A again.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 had this happen twice to it:
  • Because Comedy Central was a niche cable network when it started, very few companies bought ad space, especially during "niche"-centric shows like MST3K. This resulted in, oddly enough, lots of ads for Mentos during the show's run there.
  • Airings on the Sci Fi Channel were flooded with ads for Kahlua liquer, a phenomenon fans nicknamed "Kahlua Mudslides".
• Comedy Central seems to delight itself with this practice nowadays, often taking one random commercial every break and airing it twice. For a specific example, a late-night showing in the summer of 2024 played a Barbasol ad followed by a Red Bull commercial, followed by the same Barbasol ad and a different Red Bull commercial. This pattern played out at least twice during the same episode block.
• Shortly after The Last Airbender came out, Nickelodeon's advertising blocks became flooded with advertisements for said movie and its tie-in merchandise - which some have claimed helped lead to the film's Hype Aversion.
• Generally, approaching and during Safe Harbor on Comedy Central and other cable channels, you will find that ads for male enhancement pills, phone sex services, condoms, and, most hilariously, mattresses and sleeping pills, will triple in frequency, sometimes playing the same ad twice a break.
• The sneakiest use ever of the A1/A2 variant was shortly after the rulings that led to Side Effects Include.... Quite a few companies put out two different, yet very similar ads; the "reminder" ad would mention the name of the product, but not what it did; while the "help seeking" ad would mention what the product did, but not its name. This allowed them to circumvent being required to list side-effects. The practice died quickly.
• For a while, those using DirecTV's Extra Innings package to view their out-of-market baseball games will often find their entire commercial break populated by DirecTV commercials. Most noticeable when, on at least one occasion, four consecutive commercials of the "smear the competition" variety aired, all stating reasons why DirecTV is better than rival Dish Network (the anti-Dish commercials rarely air just one at a time, but blocks of two anti-Dish commercials combined with other DirecTV commercials are more common).
• This is a specific problem with the NHL, as hockey's viewership ratings in the US have a historical tendency of being low and tend to scare away sponsors. At one point, two different professional sportswriters complained about the over-airing of ads for the Dodge Caliber during NHL games. This was especially evident in the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals, where every single commercial break of every single game contained the same commercials from a set of maybe ten.
• The commercial for TV Land's "High School Reunion" plays during the credits of every show, at least once per commercial break, even if it already played during the credits, and with the extended preview at least three breaks per 2 shows.
• There's a fifth variation-commercials which are, shot for shot, identical, except for the race of the people in the commercial. Two examples are one where you can get your Marines in white or black, or a commercial for some doll or other where you get not only black and white doll/mother/child, but an incredibly light-skinned Hispanic trio as well.
  • An odd example of this version of the trope was a Cabbage Patch Kids ad for the Fun Bubble Baby line-up, which had two versions of the commercial: one with a female singer sung at a lower octave and one with a male singer sung at a higher octave that also advertises VHS tapes of Cabbage Patch Kids.
  • The Health Hotline ads use the fifth variation, with both being seen frequently on digital subchannels like COZI TV and Buzzr. Sometimes, it aired on major cable networks too, like TNT did during a Star Wars marathon. Sometimes, both variants of the ad would play on two different ad breaks, like it did on one COZI airing of the VeggieTales episode "Lyle, The Kindly Viking".
• Quite common with syndicated shows like Jeopardy!, where the commercials are entirely controlled by the local TV station. One local station in Georgia has run the same ad for a local state college twice during the same break, and the same ad for a doctor's office three times during another. (It used to be car dealership ads, before car sales tanked...)
  • In the 90's, this was common on syndicated children's shows. For instance, on Garfield and Friends in 1994, the same ads for for Hidden Treasures, Dunkaroos, Berry Berry Kix and Sour Berry Blast Gushers appeared every episode, with the latter two ads often playing back-to-back.
• Channel Ten, an Australian TV network, did this to their own shows in the late 2000's and early 2010's. Everything from Merlin to Rove to new episodes of The Simpsons had an ad appearing at least three times a break in the build up to the show. Lampshaded in comedian Dave Hughes' Twitter, where he joked/complained that he was already sick of his own new show, which hadn't even started up yet at the time he posted.
• Anyone living in San Diego during the 2000's and 2010's will remember constantly seeing the ads for "The GIANT Used Car Tent Sale! At Qualcomm Stadium!"
• The Xbox Live Arcade game based off 1 vs. 100 only had a handful of sponsors and a few instructional videos by host Chris Cashman to fill ad breaks.
• An online senior dating service has at least six different, very short commercials, and CNN once chose to air them in the same commercial block, back to back.
• A small-time international music awards show in 2009 (so small-time in fact it looked like it was filmed in a hotel theater) was apparently only sponsored by Guitar Hero IV.
• French TV had a noteworthy variation on this trope in 1998. It was one single 20 seconds spot for Mercurochrome band-aids, which started by the slogan (which was "Mercurochrome, le pansement des héros" - "Mercurochrome, heroes' band-aids"), then a 10 second scene, then the slogan 3 more times. In 20 seconds you could hear the brand name 4 times. Another version of the same ad had the 4 slogans at the end.
• TBS promoted Frank Caliendo's sketch comedy show Frank TV to such excess during the 2007 and 2008 Major League Baseball playoffs that one of the later ads referred to itself as part of a three-hour Frank TV promo, sometimes interrupted by baseball.
• ESPN partners with certain college football conferences (particularly the SEC) to show some second or third-rate conference games on limited distribution networks; a viewer has to subscribe to the obscure channel the game is broadcast on or order it through Pay Per View. Unsurprisingly, these games have few sponsors, and throughout the three hours of Florida vs. Crappy Sun Belt Team Destined To Lose By 60 Points viewers will see the same commercials several times.
• FOX's playoff baseball coverage became famous for this around the middle of the 2000s. The network would relentlessly flog its upcoming shows with commercials that usually centered around dramatic line readings. The short-lived shows "Girls Club" and "Skin" have earned running joke status with baseball fans ("His father is the district attorney!"). House was also promoted in this way ("You're risking a patient's life!").
• Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and Investigation Discovery all do this on a regular basis. If one of their shows has a new episode coming up, expect to see it advertised at least once per commercial break.
• For a while, whenever cable channel FX would air short, repetitive commercials for whatever original "gritty" drama it was trying to push for the upcoming season. Sing it with me: "This time you've gone too far. This time you've gone too far..."
• [adult swim] LOVES their Scion advertisements. You tend to see 3-4 within an hour.
  • They also kept airing a random promo with a deer during anime programming in the mid 2000's.
  • [adult swim] loved playing Education Connection ads.
  • The infamous "The Dawn is Your Enemy" ident was almost always followed by a SunSetter ad (whether this was a in-joke on Williams Street's part or not has yet to be confirmed).
  • INSANE amounts of AOL shilling in early days (Adult Swim appeared the same year AOL and Time Warner had finished their merger). And AOL commercials were really long to boot, taking the time they need to highlight all new features of AOL 7.0. Downplayed as time went by and dial-up went out of flavor, prompting AOL to become third-party transit service, and while still retaining some commercials, they were nowhere near as long, and were sometimes sandwiched between ad spots of competition trashing AOL. (whether or not Williams Street let the competitors' AOL-bashing ads air on purpose or not has not been stated).
• If you live in Wisconsin, local ad blocks tend to follow a set pattern of "HOM Furniture/Local Advert/HOM Sleep Express".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • During most season 1 episodes' premieres and during early reruns of the show, the same promo for Pound Puppies would air during the Credits Pushback, leading to one line in the promo, "Secret, but fun!", becoming a meme.
  • During the premiere of "The Best Night Ever", the ad for the Gyrobowl kept playing during every break.
  • The Season 3 premiere was flooded with commercials for Gak. At one point four GAK commercials aired in a row, and it didn't take long for the show's fandom to turn it into a meme. Later on, Gak ads aired twice in a row during the next episode, and ads for a similar product called Floam also aired twice in a row. The episode after that had four Gak commercials air in a row (again), then twice followed by two Floam commercials. This caused a small "Gak vs. Floam" war among the fandom.
  • During the first airing of "Pinkie Pride" (the episode with "Weird Al" Yankovic's character Cheese Sandwich), commercials for Chuck E. Cheese aired during every break. Fans were quick to note the parallels.
  • During the premiere of the series finale, most of the ads were shown more than once. The most notable offenders were this commercial for Ibotta and promos for Treehouse Masters, the series finale, and Worst Cooks in America, which were shown during every break.
• Any person who's watched CBS on Saturday mornings since the fall of 2007 might have seen for Gerber Life every break, and can recite it from seeing it too many times. This applies not only to CBS—EVERY Saturday morning block at the time, as well as several cable channels (mostly child-oriented ones), ran this commercial a lot.
  • Around November 2012, there would be two ads for Nenuco products in the same break: one for the doll line in general, and one for a school playset. Around September of that same year, an ad for a Cinderella dress and vanity set played a lot, along with the CuddleUppets ad.
  • And before the Cookie Jar TV block got cancelled, the Seat Pets ad would play once every half-hour.
  • Back when they had Kewlopolis, Play-Along Toys ^note  now Jakks Pacific advertised their products a lot.
  • During the first 5 weeks of CBS Dream Team, they played Oxi-Clean ads EVERY SINGLE BREAK! Every week after that, they played ASPCA and UNICEF ads on every show, which still continues today.
• If you watched The CW4Kids in 2010, you could not watch one ad break without seeing many ads for Skechers shoes, or one ad repeated twice. A common example of this was when TheCW4Kids aired the network premiere of TMNT: Turtles Forever. An ad for "Twinkle Toes" shoes played, followed by a "Skech-Air" ad, and then 2 more "Twinkle Toes" ads!
  • It got even more repetitive when TheCW4Kids showed off new shows and seasons in their "Friday Fall Preview", hosted by Sonic the Hedgehog. Every ad break was either a "Sketch-Air" ad or a "Twinkle Toes", with the only exception being TheCW4Kids' own ads.
• TV Asahi and its-affiliates TV Channel has proved to be the BIG offender of this tropes, Here are some examples:
  • Whenever a new Pretty Cure series begins, Yamaha music schools and Top Confectionery will air two ads in a row on some episodes.
    • Towards the end of the series, they will constantly play the ad for whatever that series' most recent power-up item is. For the record, toymaker Bandai is a major sponsor of the series.
  • TV Asahi, in between each show during the Nichi Asa Kids Time Block, ads for Kracie candy will play, the most common one being Nerunerunerune. Smile PreCure! even made a reference to one of these ads in their episodes!
  • February 2015 and March 2015 brought us tons of Doraemon: Nobita and The Space Heroes tie-in ads in between shows and sometimes during shows. Most of the ads had adults recalling memories of the show from when they were kids.
  • Tribe Cool Crew often had this ad for a instant milk powder called Senobikku playing during every single episode. Sometimes, the ad would play in between Tribe Cool Crew and the next show, Ressha Sentai ToQger.
  • In February and March of 2017, you couldn't watch any TV program on TV Tokyo or TV Asahi without seeing at least one ad for Moana.
  • Beginning with episode 30, you couldn't watch an episode of HuGtto! Pretty Cure without seeing a Furutan ad air during the program, as Furuta sponsored the program. Sometimes, like on episode 36, the ad aired before the program as well, causing the ad to appear twice in the span of a half-hour.
  • During the premiere of Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure, an ad for UQ Mobile that was set in a movie theater and had people dressed as blue monsters played twice in the break before the show began. During the actual show itself, an ad for Pretty Cure pajamas played during two of the three ad breaks.
  • Tribe Cool Crew During the second episode, an ad for Bennesse's Challenge Ichinensei program with a song by King and Prince played twice during the break before the show began.
  • This happened twice during the first episode of Healin' Good♡Pretty Cure. During the break before the show, an ad for a model of the VF-1 Valkyrie from Super Dimension Fortress Macross played twice, sandwiched by two other commercials. During the actual show, the ad for the talking Latte toy played twice, with the first commercial break playing the short version and the last ad break showing the long version.
  • On Mashin Sentai Kiramager, an ad for Nichifuri brand furikake was often shown twice, the only difference being the product advertised at the end.
  • On the final episode of Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure, an ad for Chu-ru dog snacks aired twice in the ad break before the show.
  • During the broadcast of the 2000 24 Hours of Le Mans on TV Asahi affiliate HTB^note stands for "Hokkaido Television Broadcasting"., several different ads aired multiple times.
• Nippon Television:
  • During the '80s, you couldn't watch some shows on Nippon TV affiliate Yomiuri TV without seeing at least one ad for the Namba and Tenma Takasagoden Wedding Halls, promoting the ability to win a Subaru Justy 4WD if you held your wedding at either wedding hall. In fact, this commercial even managed to re-air during reruns of Fight! Mighty Jack in the '90s, around the same time Subaru began their World Rally Championship campaign.
  • During the first hour of the 2-hour special episode of Chōmon Quiz! Shinjitsu ga? Uso ga?, which aired on March 16, 2018, an ad for Fate/Grand Order ended up airing twice.
  • During August of 2019, one couldn't watch Buzz Rhythm 02 without seeing at least one ad for Prime Video featuring footage from Mission: Impossible – Fallout and I Want to Eat Your Pancreas.
• Fuji Television:
  • During the Fuji TV broadcast of the 2000 Formula One Canadian Grand Prix, a Real Trailer, Fake Movie ad for Sun Microsystems aired twice, while an ad for O'Zack potato chips, starring Coconut Musume, ended up airing thrice.
  • During a broadcast of a September 24, 2002 game between the Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers, a promo for Quidam featuring Morning Musume aired several times.
• TV Tokyo:
  • During the TV Aichi broadcast of the last episode of The Irresponsible Captain Tylor, an ad for the VHS release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York ended up airing twice in the same commercial break.
  • During March of 2017, you couldn't watch TV Tokyo without seeing an ad for PriPara: Everyone Sparkles! Glittering Star Live that played during every show on Sunday mornings.
  • Up until episode 23 of Kiratto Pri☆Chan, an ad for the Sumikkogurashi Nintendo Switch game would always play before the show started.
• Philippine TV broadcaster ABS-CBN is a BIG offender of this whenever they air a 10-second ad, in which they play the same ad of it thrice just to fill the 30-second slot. The fourth ad after that? A different, regular 30-second one from another brand not related to the 3x one. You'd be wishing they could have just aired it 4 times just to be fair.
• GMA does the common variation, except it's "Commercial A, then Commercial B, then Commercial A again, then commercial C, and finally Commercial A one last time", with "Commercial A" being the 10-second one.
• NBC Kids loved playing the ad for Glow Crazy during every show during its first few weeks.
• In the New York City area, a Blinds 2 Go ad would play every single time as the last ad before Qubo began. This practice stopped around the time VeggieTales was dropped from the block.
• Around December 2014, MSNBC kept playing ads for Movado Watches every day at least once an hour during Morning Joe.
• Fox Family examples:
  • For the whole Captain's Treasure House block, Discovery Zone ads would play during each show. Justified, as the Captain's Treasure House Block, as well as the Fox KidsBlock, had a tie-in there at the time. Another repeat offender on various shows were the ads for the Hasbro games Fishin' Around and Lucky Ducks. The latter ad also played on Nick Jr. quite often.
  • Johnson's Kids Shampoo kept running the same ad a lot during 1999 on Fox Family. That same year, the Furby Babies commercial kept airing on the preschool block.
• There's yet another variant of this where the A1 and A2 ads play one after another. The Japanese McDonald's Happy Set commercials advertising separate boy and girl toys are always shown this way.
• In the summer of 2014, many kids' channels loved playing this commercial for Monster High dolls, leading it to be aired a total of 1,114 times in a single month, when other toy ads take months to reach that number of plays.
• In 1997, you couldn't watch USA Network's children's block without hearing "I'm a rat, I'm a rat, I'm a clever, clever rat..." every ad break. And it played so much on syndicated kids networks that one channel actually got in trouble for airing it during Bananas in Pyjamas itself. "Cheese and whiskers!", indeed...
• If you watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show on LOGO TV on Halloween, chances are you may have seen an ad from the World Wildlife Fund about tigers repeat many times during the duration of the film, along with ads for BarkBox and an app called Cookie Jam.
• In 2015, during the network's All-Star Curling Skins Game, Canadian sports channel TSN aired annoying ads for the Kidizoom smartwatch (manufactured by VTech, one of the event's sponsors) nearly every break, sometimes multiple times in a single break. Now, the bigger problem is that this ad, which seems to have been intended for constant airplay on a children's channel, was being broadcast during a mainstream sporting event. The closest comparison would be ESPN repeatedly airing a toy ad during a college football game.
• A commercial for one of the Spy Kids movies (either the third or fourth one) would air twice in a row every single time, at least on some Canadian TV channels. The fact that it started with a montage of kids screaming "Spy Kids! Spy Kids!" didn't help.
• During one episode of the Steve Harvey Family Feud on GSN in February 2015, an ad for Activia yogurt was shown twice in a row.
  • On another episode, an ad for Inside Out that said it was the number one family film in America played every break.
  • Before either of these, they liked playing ads for King Games, who created Candy Crush Saga, every break. The same thing happened on CBS' Dream Team block during winter of 2014, where sometimes, the ads would not only play every break, but they would sometimes have two different King Games ads during each break, or two played in a row.
  • As of November 2015, you can almost always expect Stanley Steemer ads during Deal or No Deal.
• A big example of this in the Northeast US — particularly the New York/Tri-State area — is the Kars4Kids ad. On any given station, it would either play once every break or once every other break. The ads are infamous enough to have become a meme and earn pop culture references (such as a Will & Grace episode featuring an expy known as "Trucks4Tykes", and an episode of The Good Place where it is portrayed as being the "anthem" of the Bad Place). It was played on 770 WABC so much that even Don Imus got mad about it on a hot mic during a commercial break.
• From the late 80's up until early 90's, ads for the 1-900-909-4300 Santa Claus hotline would frequently show up during airings of Saturday morning and weekday cartoons around the holidays on independent stations, airing at least once every other break or sometimes even twice.
• HeadOn: The ad itself owes its existence to skeptics critical of the homeopathic topical headache product lodging complaints to the Better Business Bureau, who threatened the makers with legal action, to which the company responded by removing any information that could warrant skepticism from the ads, but in a malicious compliance-tinged way. This commercial would be played often on daytime TV and cable programming. Similar to the Sapparo Ichiban example the ads were 15 seconds long and were often played twice in a row. This ad annoyed people so much, that the company who made the product created a series of commercials where people would interrupt the ad and state that they hated the commercial, but they liked the product.
• On many TV talk shows and early morning programs in the early 2000's, the ad for Jenny Craig would play at least once a break.
• On DIY Network, an ad for Teen Titans Go! where kids got excited over "The Pee Pee Dance" played every half-hour during the summer of 2015.
• Back when 4KidsTV premiered Bratz and Magical DoReMi, the commercial for Bratz Babyz Mermaidz would play multiple times during the girls programming on the block. It got to the point where it actually aired during an episode of Bratz itself, but unlike the Bananas in Pyjamas example, the FCC didn't catch this violation of their rules for children's programming.
• Companies typically buy most of the airtime during the holiday season in November and December, which includes Thanksgiving and Christmas. Ads of this nature usually start on All Saints' Day (November 1), but can sometimes start in the week before Halloween. Take into account the number of ads that have aired:
  • For over a decade YTV and Teletoon seemed to use every opportunity possible to squeeze the newest Mini Pop Kids (similar to Kidz Bop) commercial into literally every commercial break. It got so bad that the ad for the Christmas album was airing well into January(!) of the next year.
  • Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
    • The fourth variation happened sometime in the last segment of the parade from the early 80's until the late 90's. Until 1994 it was delivered immediately before the credits.
    • Advertisers that have done this over the years include Cotton Incorporated, Amana microwaves, McDonald's (who notably had multiple advertisements that they showed during the 3-hour show back in the mid-to-late 80's, and never seemed to run the same ad twice), Oshkosh B'gosh, Fisher-Price, AT&T, and General Electric (not a surprise there, since they owned NBC for many many years).
    • In 1980, the most repeated ad shown during the parade was for a now-defunct toy store called Child World. This video complies all of the store's ads shown during the parade.
    • Curiously averted in the 2016 edition, where no ad seemed to play more than twice. However, there was an alarming abundance of ads for prescription pills such as Abilify. Keep in mind that the parade is largely aimed at children.
  • From 2012 to 2015, Cablevision would overwrite ads in the middle of every commercial break for ABC Family's 25 Days of Christmas with an ad for Nassau Hobby Center, a store specializing in model trains. Sometimes, the ad would play twice.
    • During the summer in the Tri-State area you can expect to see ads for local theme parks like Splish Splash and Adventureland overwritten by Cablevision during the middle of ad breaks. On the premiere of the "Here Come The Classic Yo-kai!" episode of Yo-kai Watch, the former ad played three times, with one of those instances being two airings of the ads sandwiched between an Neutrogena commercial.
  • During most movies on Freeform during 25 Days of Christmas 2017, they always found time to squeeze in an Alone Together promo in which the two characters compare themselves to various Christmas characters like the Grinch. Also, this promo for the black•ish Spin-Off grown•ish would always play during one of the first ad breaks of movies, usually as the first thing shown during that break. The latter promo also played a lot on non-25 Days of Christmas programs.
    • During the November 23, 2020 airing of Inside Out, this trope happened a few times:
    • Ads for Target and Kohl's Black Friday sales aired during every commercial break.
    • During one ad break, the same Wal-Mart ad started and began the same ad break.
    • On Cablevision/Altice, an ad for Saint Joseph's College always showed up during the local slot.
    • The November 4, 2021 airing of Inside Out on Freeform had the ad for Fisher Price's 4 in 1 Learning Robot and an ad for Eternals play nearly every commercial break.
• During the CBC Newfoundland and Labrador broadcast of the 2017 Disney Parks Magical Christmas Celebration, an ad for Red Door Hearing and Speech played during literally every break without fail.
• When the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards were shown in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of two ads for the "Mark-It" T-shirt store would almost always play during the local ad slot. Ads for a local radio station (Mix 96.5) or a pizza place (Pizzetti's) were also frequent players in the local slot. As for non-local commercials, Taco Bell frequently showed an ad where they had a tie-in with Blockbuster.
• Back when they had The Next Star, YTV would run ads for it like clockwork, whether they be for auditions, the premiere, the finale, the promo that the contestants did during one episode, etc. It got annoying pretty fast for those who weren't interested in the show.
• Beginning in mid-November 2015 on local New York City-area TV stations (mostly on broadcast, but some cable stations like Cartoon Network also played the ad), you couldn't watch a single program without the ad for the Hess Truck playing in the local slot on every other break. It was also like this, to far lesser extent, in other states. Especially ironic because that was the first time the Hess Truck was being sold since the Hess gas stations where they were sold since 1964 went bust, and (not wanting to let the tradition die) they went to selling it exclusively online.
  • In December of 2015, the ad for Elf: The Musical was treated the same way - even after its run ended. It also played on cable networks like TBS and FX.
  • The same thing happened to the ads for Stanley Steemer and Celino and Barnes in the spring of 2016, where regardless of the channel you watch, the ad would always show up during the time that Cablevision devotes to local ads (or occasionally in the middle of the break).
• Ads for casinos, sportsbooks, and other forms are gambling are considered to be huge offenders of this trope:
  • In September 2015, ads for "daily fantasy sports" (a shortened version of often cash-based fantasy sports leagues, which some critics argue are essentially sports betting but framed as being similar to traditional fantasy sports games so it would still be a game of skill) websites, especially DraftKings and FanDuel, began to appear ad nauseum during pretty much every American sports telecast, especially football games. According to sources, both companies spent over $200 million on airtime and at one point an ad for either service aired every ninety seconds.
    • The nonstop DFS ads died down as scrutiny began to increase over the games' legality, especially when the New York Attorney General accused them of insider trading. But the same companies (as well as many others) kicked back into gear in the late-2010s when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law that effectively prohibited states (besides Nevada) from legalizing sports betting. Some users also reported seeing the ads on social media or some YouTube videos.
  • In 2021, you could not watch a single program without seeing ads for Caesars Sportsbook, where they played nearly every break.
  • Ads for online gambling services, including sportsbook websites, have become extremely common in local ad breaks across the state of Michigan ever since online gambling was legalized in that state in January 2021, to the point that sometimes almost entire breaks can be filled with nothing but online gambling ads.
• In the 80's, Dr. Pepper ads were extremely common during broadcasts of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve.
• Beginning in January of 2016, you couldn't watch any American kids' channel that shows commercials without seeing this ad for Yo-kai Watch at least once per break. It got to the point where on some airings of Baby Looney Tunes and ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks, the ad would play TWICE in a row.
• At one point, CBC seemingly wanted its late-night viewers to buy an Acorn Stairlift.
  • Similar stairlift ads also keep showing up on The Price Is Right.
• All of the kids' channels that play ads commonly showed the ad for the Magic Tracks toy during ad breaks in the summer of 2016. Some channels not aimed at kids showed the ad as well, including Buzzr, TNT, Hallmark Channel, FOX News, FXX, and Peachtree TV.
• This commercial for the Mount Airy Lodge resort played on every single broadcast television program broadcast on New York Tri-State area TV channels back in the 90's. It ran for a decade, and many people who grew up around that time in that part of the United States still have that jingle etched into their brains because of its overexposure. It seemed to get the most airtime during Who's the Boss?, causing many people who grew up during that era to associate the ad with that show.
  • This ad for a children's day camp played all the time on kids' programming during the same era. On one airing of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, the ad played at the end of each ad break.
• The commercial for Empire Today has been this for the past decade or so for anyone living in the eastern part of the United States. Anyone who lives there who doesn't have the jingle that plays at the end of the ad in their head is quite a lucky person. In Chicago, the ad plays every half-hour on channels in the area, since that's where the company originated. Some cable providers, such as Comcast and Cablevision, will often overwrite ads during the local spot during the morning or late night hours with this ad, sometimes playing it twice in a row. Like the Shirley Temple example below, the ad spurred a Fountain of Memes around 2019 due to how frequently it was shown in the late 2000's.
  • Universal Kids loves showing Empire Today ads. Unlike the cases on the network subpages where the love of the ads was due to the mandated local insertion slot (with the ads airing at the end or beginning of a break), the network constantly airs these ads during every other commercial break at various points. Sometimes, like during an airing of Caillou's Holiday Movie in 2017, the same Empire Today ad will play twice.
• As mentioned in the page quote, BMW's "The New Five" commercial was shown a lot during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
  • Coca-Cola made a big deal over the 1996 Olympics, since Atlanta was Coke's headquarters. They blanketed the airwaves with a record number of spots, some of which referenced events that had just happened.
• In early December 2016, Pizza Hut had a habit of airing an ad featuring a singing snowman during what seemed like every break on The CW - or at least during the original airing of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend episode "Who Needs Josh When You Have a Girl Group?".
  • The ad also plays as a pre-roll ad on YouTube and on TV channel-based websites that offer news such as CNN, Fox News and local affiliates of ABC and The CW.
  • Speaking of Crazy Ex Girlfriend, a certain Honey Bunches of Oats ad seemed to play during every other ad break whenever a Season 4 episode premiered.
• There's another variant of this trope where the ad repeating twice in a row is part of the ad itself, with people usually saying "One more time!". When the ad plays again, it's usually the same, but sometimes, there's only a minor difference. This variation is very common in Japan:
  • This commercial for a PriPara video game repeats twice in a row, with the only difference being the anime characters appearing the second time the ad plays.
  • An 80's commercial for Chuck E Cheese plays the theme song of the restaurant twice in a row, but the second time it is played, it is sung faster. There was also a Showbiz Pizza variation of this ad, as well as a 15-second variation using only the end of the ad.
  • Invoked in this Little Caesar's Pizza ad. The first ad announces the discount "for the first time in history", then plays the ad again, announcing it for the second time in history.
    • Another ad pulls a similar stunt: it's a brief promotion for a new offer. And then the Studio Audience chants "One more time!", after which the offer is reiterated.
  • Done in this commercial for Morinaga's Bake chocolates, where the mascot for the product says "One more time!" after the ad plays the first time.
  • The commercial for the 2001 collection of Popples is comprised of two ads that are pretty much the same, but the only difference is that there's a different set of Popples being played with and the lyrics are altered to talk about those particular Popples.
  • One of the commercials for the original Furby was comprised of two of three short ads with the same set-up and music strung together: one where two girls play "Furby Says" and another with the same girls speaking Furbish. A third variant began with a Furby sneezing and the narrator saying that Furbies need your care.
  • This Chevrolet commercial is formatted to appear as three commercials played back to back, because the announcer keeps coming back to mention more awards the company won. "Heh, Third Time's The Charm."
• If you watch the Qubo Channel, the Qubo Kids' Corner block on ION or were a viewer of their former Saturday morning block on NBC, you'll notice little to no variety on what they use in their commercial breaks.
  • Ask Me shorts would air in every single commercial break. They would play it once, twice, sometimes 3 TIMES in just one commercial break. They don't even have much variety in the episodes they would even air. So if you are a Qubo fan but hate Ask Me, you're screwed.
  • The qubo channel ad aired every break on the Saturday morning version of the block.
  • This ad for a Little Einsteins toy played a lot during the 08-09 season.
  • The ads for Pillow Pets, Dream Lites and CuddleUppets appeared a lot during the first half of The New '10s across all three qubo broadcasters.
• Retail analysts and the product manufacturers themselves have cited the Pillow Pets' television advertisements as a huge reason for their initial sales success. And boy does it show. Ask anyone who grew up in the late 2000s-early 2010s if they recognize the jingle, and they'll usually recognize it. Not only did the commercial have said jingle in it, but it was constantly repeated on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network back in the day. Even channels that didn't air children's shows played it, such as Destination America.
• In late December of 2016, this ad for Sing Happy Meal toys played on every single channel that showed children's programming, leading to much mockery and Memetic Mutation on 4Chan.
• In The '90s, infomercials and direct-response advertisements were at their peak. Because they were an easy choice to fill up commercial time due to their length, broadcasters tended to air a lot of ads of this type during their commercial breaks.
  • The Shirley Temple Little Darling Collection was advertised on multiple channels, beginning in the very start of the The New '10s, and became a running joke on social media, specifically usage of "Animal Crackers In My Soup".
  • ZooBooks was another long-running infomercial from the 90's, one that became ubiquitous enough to be frequently parodied many years later.
  • When Barney & Friends was at its peak in popularity, one couldn't turn on daytime or children's programming without seeing this ad for Barney VHS tapes.
  • A select number of Chicago-area children will think of Pokémon the Series whenever they hear certain 80's songs (namely Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)". Possibly others, too - the ad is hard to find), thanks to an infomercial for some 80's compilation CD that played during multiple episodes of that show during its tenure on WPWR (it spent a while in local syndication before Kids' WB! got the exclusive rights). In fact, the Repeating Ad practice (and the 80's compilation commercial) is briefly mentioned in this article (which is mostly about a short-lived Nestle product called "Magic Balls", but that's another story).
    I’m assuming because of how ad space is sold for children’s programming [...] there were only seven or eight total commercials that ever played; of course, in fast order, my siblings and I memorized every single one of them.
  • Time-Life Ultimate Love Songs is another ad that's fondly remembered by avid viewers of Cartoon Network in the early 2000's.
  • Lots and Lots of Trains is another one that began in the VHS era and showed up a lot on Cartoon Network.
  • Any infomercial relating to phonics, such as Hooked On Phonics or The Phonics Game, was fair game on children's programming during the 90's.
• This ad for Toys R Us was shown on weekday afternoon children's shows for many years in the United States, and its frequent airplay resulted in the ad becoming one of the most well-known and beloved ads of all time in North America, to the point where Nostalgia Filter led to it being remade fifteen years later.
• In summer 2017, there were multiple instances of TV Land playing an ad for K-Y Yours and Mine (a sexual lubricant) twice during the same advertising break (usually with one different ad in between).
• At one point in June 2017, CBS usually capped the end of every other commercial break of their shows with promos for Young Sheldon. Infamously this was the case for The Price Is Right, which sometimes had promos for that show being the only ones at the end of a break.
• During an August 2017 airing of Just One of the Guys on This TV Tampa, two different ads for some "broken glass for cash" service bookended a break.
• This article from BuzzFeed lists several commercials and public service announcements that aired frequently on New York City area TV in the 1980's.
• Central Ohio's local ads fall in this as well:
  • These SpeedyCash ads will usually appear twice in a commercial break. The worst offenders of this ad are WWHO (The CW) and WTTE (FOX).
  • An ad for flu shots "Get vaccinated, Ohio!" will most likely be seen during the local ad insertions. You'll probably see this ad all the time on Oxygen or Freeform, or any other cable network. This ad is also seen on the local stations in the area.
  • Another ad seen during the local ad insertions is an ad for Mark Albert Herder's bankruptcy offices. This ad has Beethoven's 5th Symphony in the background, and this ad has apparently been around for about 6 years, yet it can still be seen today. Like the flu shot one, this ad is commonly played on local ad insertions and can also be seen on the local stations in the area.
  • And there's the ad for "C-Span Studentcam", which is commonly seen on the HLN channel during local ad insertions. This ad isn't local though, so it's probably seen in other areas. This stopped airing once the contest ended in January 2018.
  • "Money's on the way, with CashNetUSA!" These ads seem to play a lot on FOX 28 during local programming. On one episode of Maury, the ad played every commercial break twice. There are 2 variations of the ad too, so if you see one during one break, chances are you'll see the same one, which usually starts with "When I lean back, I trust that you will be there to catch me!"
  • On one episode of America's Heartland on WSYX-TV (ABC 6) around December, a commercial for a Saturday morning cartoon block on WWHO-TV (The CW 53) called KidsClick played three times in one commercial break, which repeated twice in a row that same break. It didn't help at the time that the same ad was playing on every commercial break on The CW during local programs such as Judge Faith and The Bill Cuttingham Show, and even showed up on a primetime airing of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer. The commercials started shortly after Scary Larry was ditched. Commercials for the block also played a lot during shows on FOX 28 such as syndicated airings of Maury, Jerry Springer, The Goldbergs, and The Big Bang Theory around the beginning of 2018. It got so repetitive, that only a few days after The CW stopped playing the ads, that on January 1st, 2018, FOX 28 did the same thing, where each hour at (Insert time here):38, they would always play the ad.
• If you watched Noggin back in the mid-2000's, it was impossible to watch any show without seeing this ad for DonorsChoose.org or this promo for the channel itself. Sometimes, the ads would play back-to-back, usually when the channel was about to sign off for the day.
  • Back when they had the rights to the show, this promo for Tweenies would play during the break in between every other show on the block. During the same period, whenever a "Move To The Music" promo played, half of the time, the song would be one from Tweenies, with the most frequently-played one being the show's version of "She'll Be Coming 'Round The Mountain".
• During the inaugural airing of The Muppets All-Star Comedy Gala on the Comedy Network, a promo for the network's holiday programming (in which Santa crashes a family's house to the family's dismay) aired at the end of almost every break.
• In December of 2017 during most family-aimed shows or specials on broadcast TV ^note  such as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and holiday specials such as the Peanuts ones in the New York Tri-State area, there was a high chance that you would see this ad for The SpongeBob Musical as one of the commercials. Flagship NBC affiliate WNBC tended to show this ad the most, sometimes airing it twice during the same break or show. During the premiere of A Christmas Story LIVE!, the ad played during every single break of the second half of the show. The love for the ad returned in the spring of 2018 when it was nominated for multiple Tony Awards.
  • This ad for The Lion King, alongside several variants of it, has been known to play before the start of Good Morning America on WABC, and this ad for Wicked tends to be the most common Broadway spot during the local insertion part of ad breaks on multiple stations, including cable channels.
  • When the Frozen musical opened on Broadway, Disney wanted to make sure that people who lived near New York City knew that it existed. Ads would always play in the local spot on New York City channels, and on syndicated and/or local programming such as The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Dr. Phil and Eyewitness News, the ad would play on every single break. It even got to the point where Disney decided to do radio commercials for the show that played as frequently as the TV spots did, with said ads having been played since September of 2017, months before the show even opened!
  • Each ad break for Saturday Night Live on the New York feed of NBC typically features at least two ads for The Book of Mormon. Other active musicals also feature during the commercial breaks, but Mormon is guaranteed to appear the most.
• If you were watching A&E in late 2017, you'd most likely see an ad for Taylor Swift Now, an AT&T program. More specifically, this one.
• Universal Kids uses this trope thanks to their ad breaks normally being twice as long as those of a normal children's network (lasting up to six and a half minutes long). The most notable offender of this trope was the commercial for Teddy Ruxpin.
• The Ion network would frequently repeat the exact ads every commercial in the mid-2000s for it's original programming shows like "Palmetto Point".
• The LAFF-TV network loves playing ads frequently for FarmersOnly.com, one about every other ad break.
• The More You Know on NBC keeps playing ads for all Free and Clear Laundry Detergent, almost every commercial break, and sometimes twice!
• Crunchyroll tends to have this problem as well. It's not uncommon for all the ad breaks in a video to consist of a single ad repeated across the ad break (a total of ten times for the average anime episode).
• Mobile, AL/Pensacola, FL TV market
  • WALA-TV (a Fox affiliate) used to play a 2000s ad for a local bankruptcy attorney (which is currently in business) once during almost every commercial break outside of Fox's regular programming schedule.^note Before that, Comcast Cable (now Xfinity) used to overwrite ads on multiple channels like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon with the same ad WALA-TV broadcasts.
  • WALA-TV also used to play ads for Dale Seasoning once during almost every commercial break especially the local news.
  • Aforementioned station would overwrite ads to play promos for Telemundo coverage for FIFA 2026 on every commercial on Me TV through channel 10.7 and low-powered sister station WMBP 31.2 (Telemundo is 31.1).
• A commercial for a game called Pimple Pete (a gross game about popping pimples) has aired quite a bit during children's programming. It, for some reason, has a dude treating the game like a Let's Play, and at one point he goes "Ew, pimple juice! Gotta see that one more time!" Apparently that line was so good, the commercial always airs twice, sometimes even THREE TIMES in a row!
• With ratings rapidly failing due to increased competition from WWE Raw, commercials during WCW Monday Nitro during its last years were mostly WCW products (or parent Time Warner, and later AOL). As wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer put it, "I wish that dork with the red hair would get over Betty and find a girl with a personality. That's regarding (WCW) Mayhem video game commercial they played 4,000 times in three hours, sometimes twice in the same break, which tells you about how well the real ads are selling these days."
• During The Hub's Animaniacs Christmas Eve event, this ad for Ice Age: Continental Drift played every other ad break.
  • The weekday evening airings of Animaniacs themselves suffered from this too when they first premiered in January 2013:
    • Many ads repeated once or twice per hour-long block, with the most common being a Kia Sorenro ad featuring music by Bobby Day, an ad for the TruMoo drink, this ad for Ensure, a Party City ad promoting merchandise for the Super Bowl and this promo for Huboom. It was common to watch the block and see all these ads play at least once, sometimes even twice (which frequently happened with the Kia commercial).
    • On Tri-State provider Cablevision's Long Island services, the same three local ads would always play during the local insertion slot, in the same order: All Island Jewelry and Loan, AutoMat and Majestic Gardens.
• On the channel WTOV-TV's Fox affiliate FOX 9, during the show Comedy TV, an ad for Colgate Total toothpaste played four times in every ad break.
• During the 2009-2013 timeframe, this commercial for the Uncle Majic birthday party service (infamous for the misspelling of the word "The" as "Thc") aired a lot on NYC television, and was even used by some cable providers to overwrite ads, including on not-so-child-oriented networks such as Adult Swim and BET. The same applied for their short-lived sister organization the Elton Street Kids, who's ad would often air alongside the Uncle Majic one.
• This ad for State Farm was a staple of news channels like CNN and Fox News in 2018.
• Good lord, the Chevrolet "Real People, Not Actors" ads. At the time the campaign still ran, they were very common on A&E and during local news programs.
• A Realtor.ca ad featuring a parody of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" has been getting a ton of airplay as of August 2019.
• On an airing of local NBC show Open House NYC, ads for Ama Waterways ad were shown every break. In one break, two different ads were shown!
• If you have the 1 hour preview pass of the FOX Sports app and live in Ohio, expect to see an ad for FOX 8 Cleveland every commercial break even if you live no where near Cleveland (like Columbus Ohio). The ad is a parody of the Full House intro starring Bill Martin and Tracey McCool, and on 1 commercial break, it played as the only commercial and played 5 TIMES IN A ROW!
• The CDC's "A Tip From A Former Smoker" PSAs are very common on almost any cable or broadcast network that shows adult-aimed programming, especially during ABC's Daytime programming and on FXX, where they've been known to air during nearly every ad break.
• Every television channel in the United States took the opportunity to promote Frozen II during every ad break on the week leading to its release. Some networks played ads for the film twice in one break!
  • Ironically, people who lived near the Northern Panhandle of WV experienced the opposite, they barely saw it at all.
• During the December 5, 2019 broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas on ABC, this TJMaxx, Marshall's and HomeGoods ad played three times during the special. During the commercial break after the scene where Charlie Brown and Linus buy a Christmas tree, the ad played twice in the same break.
  • During every single Christmas special aired by the network in 2019, this ad for Portal by Facebook featuring The Muppets aired at least once per special. On some specials, like Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town, it aired twice.
• On local broadcasts of holiday parades (like the Disney Parks Christmas Parade and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade) in the New York Tri-State area in the fall of 2019, it was common to see an ad for Altice where a parrot asks for a digital assistant to play "Pump Up The Jam" as all of the appliances in the house dance to it, usually during the second ad break.
• In the mid-to-late 2000's, it was hard to watch daytime television or preschool blocks on commercial television without seeing this ad for Orajel's Little Bear toothpaste at least twice. It was so overplayed that it lasted into The New '10s and even showed up during the ad breaks of The Daily Show (!), of all programs.
• For those living in the New York Tri-State area in the late 2000's, ads for the Optimum Triple Play were very common because it was easy to fill an a break with these ads because they were a minute long. Two ads in particular for this service saw a lot of airplay during that period.
• Two new Old Spice ads cropped up around late 2019 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their famous ad campaign, always airing back to back. One has the Old Spice man give tips to William Jackson Harper on how to shill the product, and the following ad has the Old Spice man talk to his son (played by Keith Powers) about the product. These were frequently seen on NBC during The Good Place premieres, presumably due to Harper's prominence in that show.
• For those in the Tri-State area, ads for Renewal by Andersen, a window treatment company, are pretty common to see at the end of ad breaks on various broadcast television channels like CBS and ABC. The ads are aired so much that they've been seen on digital subchannels like Buzzr and StartTV, cable networks like GSN and TV Land and even on Universal Kids.
• On all children's and family TV programming aired in Japan in The '90s, ads for toys and games by company Tsukuda Original would always make their way into the commercial breaks because the company had bought tons of airtime. One of the most notable examples of this was Battle Dome, which was so common that two decades after it aired on TV, it became an Internet meme.
• For some reason, on Shōjo anime that were created by Toei Animation and were sponsored by stationary company Seika Note that aired in The '90s, either this ad for Mickey Mouse-themed notebooks, this ad for notebooks themed after Disney, or both ads would always show up in one of the commercial breaks. The ads were so popular that they ran for almost a decade, with their last appearance occuring in 2002 during the final episodes of Mo~tto! Ojamajo Doremi. The ads even appeared on shows not meeting this critera, like Moero! Robocon and Kitty's Paradise.
• In February 2020, MSNBC loved airing these Liberty Mutual ads every break.
  • If they weren't playing Liberty Mutual ads, the channel would play this Planters Peanuts commercial.
• This trope is very common with ads for amusement parks and fairs:
  • In the Cleveland, Ohio area, the advertisment signalling the start of the annual month-long I-X Indoor Amusement Park event (for example, this later version) was known to be played repeatedly during family-oriented programs during the event's annual occurrence.
  • During 2009, this ad for Davis Farmland was played often during commercial breaks on WFXT-TV Boston (then known as Fox 25, prior to undergoing Station Decay when it was sold by Fox to Cox Media Group).
  • This ad for York's Wild Kingdom was aired a lot on television stations in Maine during the 1990s, and later began to be aired by TV stations in Massachusetts beginning in the 2000s.
  • In the Long Island, NY area, the ad for the Brookhaven Fair played a lot on local TV, especially during local insertion slots, even being played on radio stations like WALK 97.5!
  • It's hard to find anybody who lived in the eastern portion of the Lake Erie region of the United States or Canada from the 1980s up until the 2010s who doesn't remember the ad for Marineland in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and its "earworm" jingle, which aired often during local ad spots.
• In early May of 2020, this Rick and Morty themed Pringles ad (it's a shorter version of an ad that premiered during the Super Bowl earlier that year) played in almost every ad break. However, it is also followed by ANOTHER repeating ad.
• During the May 21, 2020 broadcast of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on ABC, the same Honda ad which started with the phrase "You're ready to drive again" played twice in the same break, sandwiched by another ad.
• One broadcast of Jeopardy! on a St. John's area station played an ad for Campbell's soup featuring a cover of "Thank You For Being a Friend" from The Golden Girls three times. Another commercial notorious for running multiple times during shows is for Lester Lube (a local car oil change station). Ask anyone from St. John's to sing the Lester Lube jungle, and they will have memorized it after hearing it so many times over the last five or so years. The first version of the Lester Lube ad simply had a static photo of a road, making it a Kitschy Local Commercial.
• During the series finale of Modern Family an ad for Toyota featuring several references to the show and a voiceover by Ty Burrell, who plays Phil Dunphy on the show, played no less than five times. It Makes Sense in Context.
• It's hard to watch one hour of Detroit's network-affiliated TV stations without seeing at least one ad for locally-based furniture store chain Gardner-White. It's only going to get more noticeable now that their biggest competitor, Art Van Furniture, is out of business (indeed, Gardner-White's latest ads now proclaim them as "Detroit's New #1 Furniture Store", and they even took over the sponsorship for America's Thanksgiving Parade from Art Van).
  • And, of course, Bob's Discount Furniture also took advantage of Art Van's demise to do exactly what is mentioned in their own entry above, with an extra helping of a Michigan-specific ad that involves, of all things, skydiving into a map of the state showing Bob's locations there.
• Children's programming blocks aimed at preschoolers like Nick Jr. and Universal Kids frequently show this Pull-Ups ad. On PAW Patrol, it always plays during the last commercial break. The ad has also shown up on shows not aimed at parents or kids like The Chase.
• If you watched Canadian TV during the 2013 Christmas season, you probably saw an ad for Merci Chocolates multiple times during a show.
• If you have watched Doraemon reruns on the Chilean TV channel CHV in June 2004, you certainly couldn't go through a commercial break without seeing an ad for the McDonald's Happy Meal and Concurso Extra. You can see the commercial breaks here
• During election years in the US, it's all too common to see a heavily contested election have both candidates run attack ads back to back against each other. Sometimes for an entire commercial break.
• If you watched WXYZ ABC 7 Detroit's morning newscast in October 2020, you definitely didn't go through a commercial break without seeing an ad Hazel Park, Michigan gun store Universal Pawn. At one point, it got more airplay than the already repetitive local lawyer commercials!
• As of September 2020, it's very common to see the ad for the Little Live Gotta Go Flamingo on virtually every children's network in both the United States and the United Kingdom, usually playing during every single commercial break. It even got to the point where it appeared on adult-oriented programs such as reruns of Friends. This constant airplay has played a role in it selling out virtually everywhere during the 2020 holiday season.
• As described at the end of this article, KPDX, at the time the Fox affiliate in Portland (now a MyNetworkTV affiliate and the sister station to the current Fox affiliate in Portland, KPTV), had a habit of airing an ad for the Tastes & Treasures of Oregon event during every episode of Animaniacs in the fall of 1993, even after the event itself took place.
• On various holiday specials like Olaf's Frozen Adventure and Frosty the Snowman in 2020, the ad for the L.O.L. Surprise! Glamper would always play twice during at least one ad break.
• The ASPCA is notorious for this. Their ads, intended to guilt-trip people into sending them support money with footage of sad animals set to royalty-free "sad piano" music or old pop ballads, are so common on American digital multicast networks such as the True Crime Network that they're played almost every ad break, even getting more airplay than the already repetitive direct response commercials! Sometimes, they can fill half an ad break due to their ads' length.
  • Not even children's research hospitals such as Shriners Hospitals for Children and St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital are safe from this. They are essentially the same as the ASPCA ads and mostly air during the holiday season, sometimes even extending into January.
  • The American Advisors Group (AAG) was also notorious for this as well. Starting in August 2016, they had a series of ads that featured actor Tom Selleck of Magnum, P.I. fame. Like the ASPCA ads, they were infomercial length and were difficult to escape. They largely died down in the early 2020s.
• During March of 2021, Kids Station, a Japanese children's network, kept running an ad in which a man yells nearby a mountain, only for it to keep on talking back to him, that promoted their spring break lineup.
  • During a marathon of the first three Pretty Cure All-Stars films on Kids' Station on March 20, 2021, the ad for Pretty Holic makeup played at the end of two out of the three movies.
• Liberty Mutual is another common ad to see in commercial breaks in the United States. The ads for this company play so much that it's frequent to see two or three of their ads in a single hour, and occasionally twice in the same break. If there's anybody who doesn't have their jingle etched into their head, they happen to get the most airtime on CBS.
  • This is especially the case on YouTube. Every other sponsored video will open with an ad for Liberty Mutual, and in videos with multiple ads, Liberty Mutual ads will play twice or more.
  • Freevee (formerly IMDB TV) also frequently plays these ads. It's common to see two of them in the same ad break.
• A Swarovski ad kept on playing during every other ad break of the 93rd Academy Awards. Sometimes, as was the case during the preshow, the ad would be played twice in the same break.
• WBZ, a CBS affiliate in Boston, plays an ad for 1-800-Got Junk, a garbage removal company, at least once every commercial break, and they are also notorious for constantly airing ads for Bernie and Phyl's, a local furniture shop, and whenever Stop and Shop, a local chain of grocery stores, has a sale, their ads often play twice in the same break.
• Canadian network and news TV stations are known for playing an ad for the Dr. Ho system, a therapeutic foot massager for arthritis patients, that often takes up half a commercial break, since about 2016.
• During the Nickelodeon on Telemundo block in the late 90's, two ads got more airplay than others: one for Aaahh!!! Real Monsters and another for a dancing Tweety Bird toy.
• If you're watching both HouseSmarts and Laura McKenzie's Traveler on syndication in the United States, except to see an ad for the candy company Haribo during every ad break. Each one commercial break would play the ad from two to five times in the row.
• During the 2021 World Juniors Hockey Championships on TSN in Canada, ads for Friends, which was now streaming on Crave, which is owned by Bell Media, who also own TSN, played constantly, even as banner ads when the game was still going on. This continued when the tournament was over, and Bell Media was already milking the Friends cash cow enough by constantly marathoning it on their channels during the holidays.
• Disney Channel is an interesting case as they don't run traditional advertising breaks. Instead, all the commercials are specifically related to any upcoming episodes of the channel's series, or for other Disney related properties like movies, theme parks and music (along with their radio stations in the past), with actual adverts (i.e. those for non-Disney products) being substituted with "proud sponsor" spots featuring positive messages from firms like toy companies and food & drink manufacturers. So naturally if you wind up watching a Disney Channel show for a long period of time, you're bound to see the exact same commercials multiple times per hour.
• Hershey's "Christmas Bells" ad that promotes Hershey Kisses are another common ad to see on commercial breaks during the holiday season in the United States. It's been running for the past three decades, and they air so often that they appear once a break and occasionally twice in a single break. In fact, this commercial earned a Guinness World Record for being the longest-running television ad in history. Anybody who's grown up seeing those ads during that time may still have "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" stuck in their head due to overexposure.
  • The History Channel also regularly plays these ads during the holiday season, usually every one or two breaks. Sometimes it may be shown twice.
  • In a nutshell, TV Land loves showing this ad. They were simply inescapable during the 2018 holiday season, as they aired every single break.
• According to Platypus Comix, the ad for Flower Magic Mary played during every show on the premiere day of Kids' WB!.
• Andrew Van Arsdale legal services ads often aired on Court TV during the later half of 2021 and early half of 2022.
• During the early half of 2022, Go2 Bank ads were common on subchannel networks such as Stadium and TBD.
• During the early half of 2022 (around the time it was made available on free-to-air TV via the subchannels of NBC and Telemundo stations), Oxygen aired the same ads constantly during their commercial breaks, including a movie trailer-esque ad for Babybel cheese.
• Ollie's Bargain Outlet, a bargain store chain in the United States, takes a liking to this trope any time they have a sale. Anyone who lives in an area with at least one location could end up seeing it twice in some breaks.
• Dish subscribers will accept an ad for United Breast Cancer Foundation during every commercial breaking on Telemundo's daytime programming. Sometimes, it would play twice in a row.
• AlkaSeltser ads are common, just like the ailments they treat. It's not uncommon to see them once a break, or occasionally two different AlkaSeltser ads. During one CBS Evening News broadcast, the ad played every break.
• Pluto TV tends to do this with commercial breaks on many of their channels, often airing the same ads during each break. This is even done with non-ad content played during those breaks, such as Scripps News Briefs.
• In the month leading up to the release of the war film Devotion, CBS loved to show the ad for it once every break.
• In the late 2000s, Canadian kids' channels loved showing this ad for Yop drinkable yogurt.
• During the Canadian premiere of Adult Swim Yule Log, an ad for Acqua di Giò cologne, featuring the song "Way Down We Go" by KALEO, aired twice in the same break, sandwiching a belairdirect insurance ad.
• An ad for Fruity Pebbles with a loud jingle centered around the line "Yabba Dabba Doo Man!" has been airing repeatedly on all three of the big kids' networks since 2016, with no sign of stopping anytime soon.
• If you were watching the NFL playoffs in January 2023, chances are you saw this Burger King ad promoting the Whopper amongst variations for other menu items at least once almost every break. Because of their frequency, the repetitive opening and the unenthusiatic vocals, it has become a victim of Memetic Mutation, with edits of the ad appearing not too long after it started airing.
• During the final hours of Teletoon before it became Cartoon Network Canada, the commercial for Barbie Cutie Reveal Jungle Series dolls aired in every commercial break, with most breaks showing it three times. It was even the very last commercial that Teletoon aired.
• A commercial for Silk-brand milk has aired twice in many commercial breaks on the Canadian Boomerang channel.
• From early 2022 until late 2023, it was difficult to watch American television without seeing this ad for Claritin where you could make your day "the most wonderful time of the year." It is kind of odd to see a Christmas song be played at any other time of the year, particularly in the spring. In fact, the variant where one of the girls claims "it's spring" was the one that played the most during the springtime. Sometimes, the ad would play twice during a single show.
• For a few months in the latter half of 2023 and well into the early half of 2024, it was hard to watch American cable television or local news without seeing any ads for DuckDuckGo that touted itself as a "privacy-friendly" alternative to Google. There was one factor that contributed to this; that being the antitrust lawsuit against Google where they were accused of forcing said service to be the default search engine on most devices. Given the fact that one of the ads featured a spoof of the popular 1980s song "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, many people who have never heard the song have gone on to associate it with that ad.
• Since the 2022 holiday season, Hess has put out an ad advertising their collectible toy trucks that looks like an ad that would typically air on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. However, they went crazy with it and aired it mostly on broadcast networks such as CBS, even during afternoon and nighttime programming (!). While it mostly died down after 2023 began, they started showing up again in November of that year and may show no sign of stopping any time soon.
• During the Canadian premiere of the Tuca & Bertie episode "Screech Leeches", the commercial for A&W's Burgers to Beat MS fundraiser aired three times in the first commercial break.
• During Super Bowl LVIII (February 2024), this ad for e-commerce marketplace Temu aired four times, in addition to another airing right after the game ended. Considering the average price of a single Super Bowl ad at the time was $7 million, several people questioned how Temu managed to get enough money to buy all that ad space.
• As of 2024, it's been difficult to watch a single program without seeing an ad for Everything Breaks playing in the local spot. They can hog up half a break since these ads are infomercial length.
• If you live in Alabama, you cannot resist seeing ads for a fast-food chain Jack's (not to be confused with Jack In The Box) aired during every local ad breaks. There is a face that one local ad gets air between two from Jack's.
• To those living in America around the time of Independence Day, ads for sales, bargains, or specials themed around the holiday will almost always have this trope inflicted on them.
• For those living in Pennsylvania, if the Pennsylvania Lottery introduces a new scratchcard game, good luck trying to go just one commercial break without seeing an ad for it. These ads get the most airtime during the holiday season.
• On January 3, 2022, Knowledge Network aired a promo for the series premiere of Odo twice in the same break before the Knowledge Kids block signed off.
• NASCAR fans watching the races on either FOX or NBC around 2022 or 2023 were often annoyed by a Coca-Cola Zero Sugar commercial that would repeatedly air during commercial breaks, with its techo beats (which rips-off "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger") and the soundbite at the end of the ad ("I need to try it, first. Yah! Yah! Yah!").
• During the 2024 NBA Playoffs and NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs, fans of both leagues would complain on social media about a repetitive AT&T commercial where Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Chet Holmgren of the Oklahoma City Thunder singing an off-key version of "What a Girl Wants", which they sung as "What a Pro Wants". When the Thunder were eliminated by the Dallas Mavericks that year, many fans celebrated their elimination because it meant that the ad would stop airing.
• In early 2025 starting from President's Day, you couldn't watch a single program without seeing ads for the Nissan sales offers in the local spot. They were so widespread that they often played twice, sandwiching one or two other ads or even in a row.
• When Beetlejuice (1989) aired on Teletoon in Canada in the mid-2000s, ads for Dora the Explorer toys were constantly aired, despite Beetlejuice having a target demographic much older than that of Dora. Other Nick. Jr. show toylines were advertised during the show as well such as The Backyardigans and Go, Diego, Go!.
• During the 2025 NCAA basketball tournament, the GEICO commercial with Michael McGlone and Maxwell the pig seemed to come on every other ad break, to the point where viewers were sick of it. Particularly noticeable because the commercial (originally aired in 2010) was in 4:3, a rarity by this time.
• Starting in 2025 during the CBS Sunday Morning program, an ad for J.P Morgan Chase bank with the song "The Green Grass Grows All Around" airs at least once during the show.
• During a NCAA Basketball game on December 6, 2025 on ESPN2, this Liberty Mutual commercial featuring a man being attacked by seagulls was played twice in succession in one break.
• If you watched American television any time in 2025, even on any of the big four networks, you couldn't go one break without seeing ads for Nature Made. It's not uncommon for specific ad variants to be adored; this one featuring a little girl excited for grandma's arrival seemed to play the most.

• Sapporo Ichiban is this for many older Canadians who grew up in the pre-internet age. Because the ad was 15 seconds long, it used to be run twice in a row every time — and in some markets, the double commercial ran four or five times an hour because the company had bought so much airtime.
• GEICO ads tend to play often on any network they buy ad space on. Sometimes, two different short Geico ads can air back-to-back.
• At one point, Allstate would buy back-to-back ad space slots, with two short "This isn't the time to wish you had accident forgiveness" ads shown together.
• During the popularity of the Crazy Frog ring tone in the United Kingdom (where this trope is generally not as noticeable) an advertisement for the sound featured on almost every ad-break on some satellite channel, often re-occurring. This prompted large numbers of complaints to the industry regulator who responded saying that essentially they were in no position to stop a paid for advertisement simply on the grounds of repetition. (Later it was ruled, because of the nature of the subscription service the Crazy Frog was advertising, that it couldn't be shown before the watershed.)
• McDonald's has used the third variation of this trope, using three commercials (featuring Line Rider, a black kid in a white shirt having fruit blasted at him, and a girl inexplicably acting like a chicken). Another version they did was the "dad forgot the fries" commercial. In the first spot, you see a father buy food for his family and eat fries all the way home, so when he comes home, there are no fries left to give to his family. The kids cheer when he comes home, but become disappointed when there are no fries, so he goes out to buy more. End commercial. The second one starts the same, but this time when he comes home, it's to an empty house and his wife asks him "You did it again, didn't you?"
• The Twix commercial in Poland, which used a theme of "doubleness": "When you've got a break - take Twix! Double candybar - double break!" This ad was aired twice each time, one after another.
• Bob's Discount Furniture pulls this a lot. They use multiple variants, too. One variant of an older commercial that technically falls under the A1/A2 variant, but the only difference between the two commercials is the color of the couch — they start the commercial break with an ad featuring a dark brown couch/sofa/whatever set, then the last commercial of the same break will be exactly the same, only now the couch, sofa and everything else are beige. The question of how they even made the same commercial twice remains a mystery.
• Screwed with for a certain collection of "Go to this site" ripoff commercials (here is an example), where the content was essentially the same, but the address was different each time, because the numbers that began or ended the address were randomly generated. They used different numbers for different demographics/channels/times of day/etc. so they could figure out where their victims are coming from, then concentrate their scam ads more there.
• Pizza commercials are often shown twice in a row. Includes Papa Murphy's, Dominos, and possibly others.
• On the weekend it came out in theatres, commercials for Hot Tub Time Machine could be seen nine times in just over an hour.
• Combined with Commercial Switcheroo in this Pedigree Dentastix commercial. The first commercial is for a ridiculous product called "Doggie Dentures", and the first thing the second one (which, by the way, has the same "setting" as the previous one) shows is a dog with a Dentastix treat in its mouth staring at the camera, while the announcer says, "You're...kidding, right?" as if in response to the previous commercial.
• The UK's railway governing body Network Rail uses such a tactic in its current level crossing awareness campaign. A motorist pulls up at a level crossing, a couple of adverts show, a train passes, more adverts, then the motorist begins to move his car around the lowered barriers and slams the brakes on as he nearly collides with another train on the second line.
• This commercial for Sears Central Air Conditioning from the mid 1990's which would even air on kids channels in the middle of winter, sometimes three times in the same ad break! "What's the paper say about tomorrow? 'Nother scorcher! Cool!"
• Invoked by Reese's, with an advertisement mentioning déjà vu to represent the two cups in each package. The commercial is then played again.
• This Japanese commercial for the Morning Rescue energy drink showed up frequently during Puella Magi Madoka Magica, helping it become a meme. It was kept in on a number of fansubs because of its extremely campy nature, which helped distract viewers from the dark nature of the program, and J-List even started selling Morning Rescue online as a result.
• These two commercials, for Booking.com and Angel Soft respectively, commonly appeared on certain websites that insert video ads on their pages. If a website that plays either ad is browsed on a mobile device while you are listening to music, the ad will pause the song and show the audio of the ad only until it finishes, despite the user not being able to hear it. The same thing also happened on the mobile version of Wikia, with the offending ad being one for iTunes Movies ad hawking the then-recent digital release of Sing.
• The Hershey's s'more ad and many Air Wick ads are known to be extremely repetitive (especially during dusk to early morning hours), sometimes both playing as one whole ad break.
• This Everest College commercial was known to be extremely repetitive, often airing during evening sitcom reruns on local stations. The ad was so common that it even showed up on kids' channels!
• This ad for the Encyclopedia Britannica, where a kid boasts about reading it to help him with his research, aired constantly in the early '90s.
• Amazon has been known to frequently air two ads back-to-back or bookend commercial breaks on any network where they buy ad space.
  • The "I Need You" ad was constantly aired on multiple networks during the time it was run.
  • The "Joy is Shared" campaign was a staple of high-traffic events like the NFL Thanksgiving and Black Friday games. The 60-second cinematic version often opened a break, while the 15-second "reminder" spot closed it.
  • The "Buy with Prime" service uses the A1/A2 variation; one ad depicts a customer using the service for a specific product, followed immediately by an identical ad for a different product.

• When the WEAF radio station started broadcasting in 1922, the very first radio commercial for the station was by the Queensboro Corporation, and set this trope in motion by airing multiple times a day to ensure the then-new concept of radio advertising actually stuck with listeners.
• Shults Ford, a Ford dealer located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who has a radio ad consisting of a guy saying the name of the store, which speeds up, topped with an over-the-top "YEEHAW!" The ad aired constantly when it was still run on radio.
• There was an advertisement on the Finnish radio station Iskelmä that ran during most commercial breaks, usually multiple times at that. The ad was for FinnHooks, wooden hook-thingies that are used to relieve pain in hard-to-reach areas or something.
• Radio station WPLJ would play the ad for the Liberty Science Center's Sesame Street Presents: The Body exhibit at least once an hour.
  • In the summer of 2018, they gave the same treatment to the radio ad for the SpongeBob musical.
• For those living in Florida, there's Appliance Direct and its counterpart, Scratch & Dent World. Both are owned by the same couple who started a chain of appliance stores. Scratch & Dent World is essentially the same, but they exclusively sell appliances that were scratched or dented while being sent to the stores, but otherwise work fine and would have otherwise not been sold. They bought tons of radio air time, even at one point acquiring a sponsorship deal with one station. As a result, their ads were so common on Florida radio stations that some actually filed complaints over them.
• During the summer of 2016 on radio station WPLJ, the ad for Playland Park (an amusment park formerly known as Rye Playland) was played every break.
• Audacy radio stations often run PSAs sponsored by the company's 1Thing enviromentalist campaign during ad breaks. Beyond these PSAs, they are known for piling on ads for their own app across all local affiliates, often playing the same ad encouraging listeners to download their app at the start and end of a single break.
• Listeners of various stations in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan have frequently cited Windshield Wizard and Perfection Paint & Body for running the same catchy, albeit grating jingles multiple times an hour for years.
• Spence Diamonds in nearby Edmonton has become infamous for their screaming ads. The high-pitched "WOW!" at the end of their commercials has been played so frequently for decades that it became a meme among listeners.
• In stations serving the Milwaukee area, the Kars 4 Kids jingle is a legendary offender, often appearing in every single break during sports broadcasts. Other regional repeats include Penny Mustard and Hassleless Mattress, both of which are owned by the same family, airing back-to-back.
• In Phoenix and Philadelphia, the Top Dog Law commercials are notorious for their high frequency, with the same "Don't call a dog, call the Top Dog" hook repeating across multiple stations in the same market.
• Listeners of Octane, LiquidMetal, and Turbo on SiriusXM often report hearing the same band, specifically Metallica, or the same promotional spots during every single transition between songs or talk segments.
• If you've listened to NPR at any time, broadcasts usually begin with "support for this podcast comes from", with the same two or three sponsors such as BetterHelp and Shopify to name a few examples, read by the same narrator at the beginning, middle, and end of a single hour's programming.
• Following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, commercial stations replaced all regular ads with a handful of public service announcements. The song "Aisatsu" played so many times in a row that it caused all listeners in the country to suffer from advertising fatigue.

• Examples relating to YouTube have their own page.
• MLB.tv (Major League Baseball's online streaming service) was notorious at one point for using commercials for themselves as filler in ad breaks. In fact, in the course of a single baseball game, lasting around 2 hours and 40 minutes, there are somewhere around 40 commercials (of two varieties) for the same service that you were already using to view the game.
• If you watched the livestream of Million Second Quiz, you would see one out of three ads for Subway (which would start the livestream anytime you opened it) and promos for NBC shows. Some of these ads repeated over and over since the livestream didn't really have many sponsors.
• On many websites streaming anime and Animesque shows such as Magic Adventures of Mumfie, this ad for Mister Sparky, an electrician service with a jingle at the end, would be played as the only ad before the videos. Some episodes would play the ad TWICE IN A ROW. Those who live near a Mister Sparky service can also see it before some YouTube videos!
• Whenever Twitch plays ads, there's a good chance it will just play one ad, over and over again, for as long as they feel is necessary before taking you to the stream/VOD you're trying to watch, which many have complained about.
• In 2019, users of the streaming service Stirr often saw an ad for Ashley HomeStore's Black Friday sales during every commercial break on each channel.
• On the streaming app and website of CTV, it is not uncommon to see the same ad repeated five (or more) times during a half-hour show. What makes this even worse is that not only are the ads played at a far higher volume than the show itself, but that the ads sometimes pop up at inopportune times (such as when a character is in the middle of a sentence).
• Roku TV is a streaming box-oriented live TV service known for its many highly specialized channels, which revolve around specific genres or even specific shows (for instance, there's a channel dedicated to nothing but the first 26 seasons of Doctor Who). Because of how niche these channels are, ad space tends to be purchased by only a handful of companies, and as a result, commercial breaks will sometimes be filled in by taking ads and repeating them as many times as possible to avoid dead air. On some occasions, a commercial break can consist entirely of one ad on a loop.
• Typically on Google Play Music, you get the same selection of audio ads, almost always public service announcements or promos for podcasts such as Welcome to Night Vale, that play in between every few songs on a playlist.
• Spotify is notorious for this if you don't have premium. Depending on the number of companies advertising on the service, they will usually have to play the ads they have on their hands multiple times to avoid dead air. Very rarely, a break would consist of a single ad on a loop. An ad for Ikea where a man with a Swedish accent talks about how his voice isn't "exciting enough" was a popular one in summer 2020, as was one for a playlist featuring "That's What I Like" by Bruno Mars and "Give Me One Reason" by Tracy Chapman.
• Amazon Prime Video (including the now-defunct Freevee service) frequently loops the same 15-second in-house ads for its original series two or three times in a single break. Glitches in the ad server have even resulted in the same ad playing over itself simultaneously.

• Twitter examples:
  • Sometimes, a timeline can be overrun with ads. Sponsored tweets/posts usually appear every four to six tweets, and as a result, users can end up seeing the same promoted tweet more than once on a single timeline. According to this article by TechCrunch, one user saw four sponsored tweets in a row.
  • A common "funny because it's true" observation among users is blocking an account that causes this trope leads to their ads appearing more frequently. This has led to conspiracy theories that the algorithm is buggy or aggressively retargeting interactors, even if blocked.
  • One example from Twitter was this video promoting the Nickelodeon summer line-up that showed up a lot in the summer of 2019, along with ads for the reboot of All That. These ads most often show up on the day when the latter show is going to premiere a new episode, though they will also show up when they're about to premiere a new episode of a show (like the day Pups Save The Mighty Twins premiered) or a movie (like when they premiered Epic (2013)) that day.
  • Nickelodeon does this a lot for any big event. Perhaps the worst offender was the ads for their broadcast of The SpongeBob Musical, which took every single ad slot and had its ads start a week before the actual event, when most ads for new Nickelodeon shows or specials only showed up the day of said event. Complaining about the frequency of the ads became a meme among the animation community.
  • Ads for BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! are also a common sight on Twitter. Whenever a new event is added to the game, the official account will promote it every five ad spaces. The collaboration with Hatsune Miku got slightly more promotion, with ads promoting it appearing every three ad spaces.
  • When the PAW Patrol special "Mighty Pups Super Paws: Pups Save The Mighty Twins" was about to premiere, not only did the ads for it invade Twitter, but they also frequently showed up on YouTube and Instagram.
  • Beginning as early as November 26th, 2019, an ad for the Frozen II soundtrack took every other ad slot. Even worse, the ad was comprised of a majority of the "Show Yourself" sequence in which Elsa finds her true destiny and changes into a new outfit.
  • When Touhou LostWord launched in North America, the Good Smile Company wanted to make sure everyone on Twitter knew it existed, and it didn't take long for the site to get flooded with these ads. Some in-game events also received similar treatment.
  • Ads for online gambling services, including sportsbook websites, are also common on Twitter in states where sports betting is legal. Any time there's a big sporting event, many of the major sportsbooks including FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM will promote every few ad spaces. When the 2021-22 American Football season was beginning, the ads for them got pretty bad, taking up nearly every single ad slot for the matches that were intended to take place. Sources say they spent over a billion dollars on airtime.
  • A partnership between Twitter and BetMGM reached a new repitition from early 2024 to 2025. Rather than just standard videos, Twitter began displaying live betting odds in-stream. During major sporting events like the Super Bowl or NBA Finals, these dynamic ads often occupied every three or four ad slots in the For You feed, making them functionally inescapable, even if you're not a sports fan.
  • In September 2024, every other ad slot promoted the 2024 Cooking Mama game.
  • Following in the footsteps of the previous mobile game examples, Royal Kingdom became a staple of this trope throughout 2025. According to Sensor Tower data, it was the most marketed mobile game in the United States for a significant portion of that year. Users reported seeing the same playable puzzle ad, often featuring the king in peril, multiple times on a single timeline, regardless of whether they already downloaded the game.
  • When some major brands began returning to Twitter in 2025, they often did so with massive, concentrated spends that created this effect. One example is when Amazon Prime Video was combating ad fatigue on other platforms; they utilized countdown-style ads for major releases of series and films. They were set to trigger at a high frequency that users would see "X days to go" or "out now" ads within the same two-day window, often multiple times per hour.
  • The annual Spotify Wrapped campaign used personalized promoted tweets that trended globally. Because of the high engagement, the algorithm often served these ads to the same user repeatedly to encourage the viral sharing cycle.
  • One of the most widely reported instances of this trope in early 2026 involves a generic advertiser under the handle of @Products. Users on both Twitter and Reddit have complained that these ads, often featuring low-quality gadget slop or dropshipped items, appear every few timelines.
• Instagram examples:
  • Users frequently report that their feeds have shifted to a rigid 50-75% ad ratio, where a sponsored post appears after every two posts. This is known as the "Every Third Post" rule.
  • There have been bugs where scrolling through Reels or Stories resulted in ten or more sponsored posts in a row without a single piece of content from followed accounts.
  • Even if you mark specific categories such as weight loss, gambling, or baby products as sensitive in settings, the same ads for BetterHelp, HelloFresh, or Ozempic often reappear immediately after being dismissed.
  • Instagram frequently showed ads that were probably by the same company that referenced "God's Plan" in the fall of 2018. Here's one example of these ads.
  • Depending on your ad settings and if you're on iOS or Android, ads for hyper casual mobile games will show up every other ad space, though some of them are ads for those "fake mobile games". For example, the platform loves displaying ads for Royal Match, and can sometimes show up multiple times on a single timeline. Outside the platform, the same thing goes for many mobile games that require users to watch ads in order to do certain things.
  • Some users reported seeing two sponsored posts in a row, and sometimes both those sponsored posts can be for the same product or brand, or even from the same company.
  • This trope is very common for animated films. In the month leading up to the theatrical releases of Inside Out 2, The Garfield Movie, and Despicable Me 4 in the summer of 2024, every timeline on Instagram took the opportunity to promote them. A timeline usually began with an ad for one of these films and some timelines displayed ads for either one more than once. Then during the 2024 holiday season, Disney used the platform to roar the release of Mufasa.
  • In August 2024, ads for LEGO Duplo sets appeared at the start of nearly every timeline. Same thing goes for Nintendo advertising their upcoming R-rated adventure Emio: The Smiling Man on Nintendo Switch.
  • In October 2024, ads promoting manga published by Kodansha were fair game, and so was an Android ad featuring members of Le Sserafim.
  • Then during the 2024 holiday season, Huggies ended up hugging the start of timelines with their own ads for Huggies diapers.
  • In February 2025, when the third season of Grip: A Toyota Story released, Toyota drove the ad onto a lot of timelines. Some timelines displayed the ad twice.
• TikTok examples:
  • Since the 2024-2025 push for social commerce, users often encounter the same viral product ad such as Shadow Work Journal or specific kitchen gadgets every three to five videos.
  • Following the US ownership transition in 2025, users reported a bombardment of ads, whose frequency spiked significantly to recoup costs, sometimes reaching between 16 and 19 ads in a row during a single scrolling session.
• Reddit examples:
  • Trilobyte and Worthy ads show up in every other ad space.
  • A common complaint is the repetition of specific high-budget campaigns like Chumba Casino or religious/political campaigns that appear at the top of nearly every subreddit feed, regardless of relevance.
  • Users have occasionally reported a glitch where seeing a sponsored post for Reddit itself while using the official app leads to a redundant loop.
• In My Tamagotchi Forever, ads for Toreba and Love Nikki Dress-Up Queen will often show up. The former ad is so common that sometimes it will show up twice in a row when you're trying to do an activity that requires you to watch an ad, like continuing one of the mini-games or speeding up the sleeping time of your character.
• MobilityWare's card and solitaire games aren't safe from this either. Ads for DoubleU Casino and Homescapes show up regularly every time you start a new game or perform an action that includes an ad.
• On YouTube, the most common ad is an ad for Amazon AR, while the second most common is a YouTube Music that uses Cardi B's "I Like It".
• In February 2025, ads for Tubi showed up all over Tumblr.

• Many theatres, at least in North America and Japan, have about a half-dozen ads that cycle through in a loop until the movie starts.
• For at least three months before Cloverfield came out, movie theaters were averaging two previews for it per movie. Before the trailers there was a Kodak ad made up entirely of clips from Cloverfield, and then there'd be the actual movie ad during trailers.
• On a Regal Cinemas First Look pre-show, an ad for Jurassic World toys played twice during the same preshow.
• Sometimes, this trope applies to magazines. As pointed out by The Angry Video Game Nerd in the video game magazines episode, an ad for the Game Player's Pro-Tip Hotline shows up a total of three times in a single issue of the eponymous magazine.
• This trope can also be found at one of the major stations in Glasgow, Scotland. Above the departure times for the trains, the monitors above have a selection of ads that cycle in a loop.
• The Finnish movie festival Love And Anarchy shows their own ad at the start of every screening. While it's usually witty, many regulars buy their tickets in sets of nine and see two to four movies every evening, so the ad gets old fast.
• The trailer reels before most showings of Ralph Breaks the Internet were book-ended by 2 different teaser trailers for Toy Story 4.

• In Shock Treatment, we first see the Farley Flavors Fast Food commercial when a show on DTV takes a break, and if you listen closely, we can hear the commercial play again when Janet is at Brad's parents' house.

Webcomics

• In the Free Spirit comic "I Love Bread", on the retro TV show app Jessie watches, this Weight Watchers ad starring Oprah Winfrey keeps interrupting the Cagney & Lacey episode she tries to watch. Then, as if that weren't bad enough, the ad loops on all the in-flight TVs and even the screen in the cabin as a result of Winnie's magic.

Western Animation

• Parodied on Family Guy when Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man Warehouse and Emporium has a sale on Crudely Painted Not So Funny Plywood Cutout Folk Art. Like, over and over.
• Given the large marketing campaign of Teen Titans Go!, the show itself ended up satirizing this trope in "We'll Be Right Back". The whole episode consists of the Titans being interrupted by parodies of overplayed commercials.