Why Current Anti-MFA Approaches Aren’t Enough
Forbes operated an alternate version of its website stuffed with ads and sold those ads to blue-chip brands such as McDonald's, Disney, and Microsoft, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. All six major agency holding companies bought ads on the site (www3.forbes.com).
This latest made-for-advertising scandal shows that, while industry attention to so-called MFA sites has skyrocketed in recent months, it's harder for brands to avoid MFAs than many in digital advertising suggest.
Why It's Hard to Avoid MFAs — and How to Do It
Most adtech companies that help advertisers avoid MFAs and run ads only on high-quality sites screen out MFAs on the system level. In other words, they use domains to block some sites altogether. The Forbes episode shows the insufficiency of this approach because it is highly unlikely that a brand safety vendor would have blocked a forbes.com domain.
Instead of blocking MFAs based on their domains only, advertisers should analyze individual pages in the segments they buy. By looking at proxy signals such as impressions in context, brands and their partners can easily weed out individual pages that consume ad budgets without delivering real audience engagement.
For example, let's say you analyze each individual page on a site that usually generates 100,000 impressions per article, and you notice that one-page claims to have generated 100 million impressions. (This type of thing happens all the time.) You would then know that the page in question is stuffed with ads or supported almost entirely by paid traffic.
Who's to blame for MFAs' persistence?
Forbes blamed adtech company Media.net for allegedly misrepresenting its inventory to ad buyers and also claimed it didn't operate an alternate site, calling it a "subdomain." Media.net said an unintentional error caused the alleged misrepresentation.
Meanwhile, the Forbes subdomain couldn't be found on the main Forbes site or via search engines. Rather, it was promoted via content recommendation companies (prominent examples of which include Taboola and Outbrain).
The bottom line for advertisers is that there were two main culprits behind this diversion of ad dollars to low-quality, made-for-advertising content: a publisher that created a bogus site as well as content recommendation engines driving traffic to it so that the site could monetize those eyeballs at a higher rate than it paid for them.
Unfortunately, these schemes are not going away anytime soon. MFA purveyors are alive and well. So, advertisers need to deepen their controls to avoid wasting ad spend on them.
What's the big picture for advertisers?
It's tough out there for publishers, most of whom are trying their best despite challenging market conditions to monetize real content that delivers value to audiences. Unfortunately, some will take advantage of the opacity of the digital advertising market to make a quick buck at the expense of advertisers.
Advertisers should expect this, and they should know that screening for MFAs at the domain level is not enough. In fact, they should not only be screening out individual pages stuffed with ads but also homepages and channel fronts that are irrelevant to their ad campaigns. The goal for advertisers should be to run ads only on the individual pages most relevant to their audiences.
Unfortunately, the long-touted goal of allowing advertisers to meet the right audience in the right place at the right time is still elusive. MFAs, fraud, and poor targeting stand in the way. Analyzing every single page they run on is the only path to a better status quo.
The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
Dave Hills is a digital advertising veteran and the CEO of Advanced Contextual, an adtech company that helps advertisers reach their audiences efficiently at scale across the open web and social with contextual advertising.