Programmatic Transparency: Made for Advertising Websites Are Too "Good" to Be True
It certainly shouldn't surprise any of you that we will kick-off this series with a post on made-for-advertising websites (MFAs), which the ANA's Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study revealed to be eating the lunch of open web publishers at jaw-dropping scale. In just the last month, MFA sites have been back in the news, prompted by the "revelation" that significant portions of major brands' programmatic spend continues to make its way to these low-quality content sites. So, in this, our first deep dive into the key findings of the study, let's lay out what MFA are, how they work, why they're a problem, and what you should do about it.
What are MFA sites?
You have most certainly experienced an MFA site in action: They attract visitors with clickbait headlines and images and feature low-quality content combined with as many ad impressions, and views, that the human brain can tolerate. You'll find ad-to-content ratios of 30 percent-plus, twice the average, rapidly auto-refreshing ad placements, including autoplay video ads, and slide shows forcing visitors to click through multiple pages to access content, each with multiple ads.
Further, they have little to no organic audience and feature only syndicated, dated, regurgitated, and in some cases, plagiarised content. The user experience borders on awful and creates an environment where no self-respecting advertiser would ever want to see their ads appear in.
MFA's business model relies on selling site visitor impressions for marginally less than they can buy them. To do this, MFA publishers thoroughly game the programmatic media buying ecosystem. So forewarned, let's look at exactly how they do that.
How do they work?
MFA sites are purpose built to exploit the programmatic ecosystem – they exhibit high measurability rates, good viewability rates, and low levels of invalid traffic, and usually have brand-safe environments. On paper, they look great, and that appeal extends to the programmatic environment where these traits are prized and prioritized, thanks in particular to autoplay, sound-off video ads, they perform well on video completion rates.
Meanwhile, the ANA study found that media CPMs paid on MFA websites are 25 percent lower than those paid on non-MFA websites. In other words, MFA websites look incredibly attractive to DSP bidding algorithms and on campaign roll-up reports. They are the programmatic equivalent of showing a red flag to a bull, with similar consequences to the advertiser.
Even more insidious, MFA sites are built to pass any human checks on their suitability for advertisers. While investigating MFA supply, DeepSee, which partners with TAG TrustNet to assess MFA in the ANA's study, found that many remove ads when people visit a site directly, but flood the page when people come via social media, search engines, or content recommendation widgets.
What's the problem?
The big-picture problem should already be clear. Marketing's role is to help persuade people what to buy and common sense tells us that this is not what ads that are delivered on MFA sites achieve. What they do instead is deliver handsomely against the proxy metrics we most often use in digital channels to gauge success. And while those metrics are useful they are only useful in context. Those metrics don't consider things like editorial quality or user experience, both of which are at best sub-par and detract from MFA sites' ability to influence a business outcome.
In an ideal world, a healthy digital advertising ecosystem would see great, original content rewarded with programmatic investment. As the ANA study reveals, we're far from seeing that dynamic today with a large reason for that being the success of MFA in siphoning off large portions of advertiser dollars by gaming their KPIs while delivering almost no value in return!
How large a portion of advertiser dollars are going to MFAs? Well, I am glad you asked, as the ANA report revealed that 21 percent of study impressions and 15 percent of spend went to MFA sites, equivalent to approximately $10.1 billion of spend. Every advertiser that participated in the study recorded at least some media spending on MFA websites, and even private marketplace (PMP) deals carried significant amounts of MFA – 14 percent on average.
More striking might be the continued lack of awareness and/or attention paid to the issue. Per the ANA Programmatic Benchmark Survey, a quarter of marketers were still not aware of MFA sites, despite all the recent press, while 46 percent said they don't – and don't plan to – track MFA spend. Even among those who are aware, most are in denial when it comes to how MFAs are stealing from them. I recently spoke to a highly respected Fortune 10 digital media lead and she assured me that she was confident that she didn't have an MFA problem because her ad verification partner assured her she didn't.
However, the problem was that I was looking at page after page of screenshots of her company's ads showing up on some of the most pernicious MFA sites – all of which had her ad verification company's tags by the way – while we were speaking over Zoom. In several cases, there were as many as five of her company's ads on the same page.
Additionally, the sustainability impact of MFA sites is especially troublesome. Scope3 reports that MFA sites generate 26 percent more carbon emissions than non-MFA inventory with many ads per page that indiscriminately make ad calls to as many demand sources (like SSPs, DSPs, and ad networks) as they possibly can. If you are trying to achieve a sustainability target in 2024 by reducing your carbon footprint, I am willing to bet that you can do so simply by eliminating MFAs from your campaign!
What can be done?
The value that MFA sites offer marketers is minimal. There may be some advertisers, particularly direct response and performance marketers, who find value in placing programmatic media buys on MFA sites but those are edge cases where risk to brand reputation is low because their brand value is often on the low end of the spectrum. For the vast majority of ANA members, specifically and brand marketers in general, you need to establish clear and enforceable policy regarding MFAs and demand greater accountability from your supply chain partners against those policies.
Here's what you and your agencies need to do next:
1. Establish policy regarding MFAs, including what constitutes an MFA and that you will not pay for any ads for your business that appear on MFA sites. This is part of a larger "Inclusion List 2.0" narrative that I will include in a future post here. There are several resources you can leverage to start to build your catalogue of MFA sites that are available at these links (jounce, Ad Fontes Media, DeepSee, etc.).
2. Determine, independently, if and how MFA sites fit with your own definitions of brand suitability and customer experience standards. If they do, might I respectfully suggest that you review your standards.
3. Run your vendor selection protocol on a strategy of "inclusion" not "exclusion" site lists. Attempting to exclude individual sites from the vast expanse of websites (some 4,500 MFA sites alone according to DeepSee), with new domains being created every day, is a herculean and futile task. An inclusion list needs to be enforced to be effective however, so partner with your agency and your ad verification vendors to ensure that they are doing everything they can to ensure that vendors who are not on your inclusion list (or your exception list if your core list doesn't deliver enough demand or diversity to meet your business priorities) aren't getting your business or your money.
4. Audit your activity to understand the share of impressions and spend represented by MFA websites. Make it clear that log level data generated by your investments is your data and that you won't do business with any vendors (DSP, Ad Verification Partner or SSP) who do not provide that data.
5. Set a goal to bring the number of MFA sites your ads appear on down quarter by quarter until it approaches zero.
6. Adopt a comprehensive parallel strategy that includes ongoing log-level data analysis blended with a constantly updated MFA site list. It can be done today through providers such as Fiducia and DeepSee.
7. Recognize that, if you do reduce or eliminate MFA spend, your CPMs will increase but your CPAs will likely decrease – decide which metric is more important to you – and your CFO. We all need to think differently about cost versus value and MFA are a manifestation of why we're getting the trade-off wrong right now. Fiducia's True KPI Framework is a perfect example of how we can assess and optimize to impressions based on quality, as well as price.
As many will know, a personal mission of mine is to change the paradigm of programmatic investment such that great, original content, especially quality journalism, is rewarded thus preserving the "open web" which is vital to so many people. Open web publishers are in huge pain because of the increasing gamification of the ad ecosystem by bad actors such as MFAs and walled gardens and their inability to challenge how things are working today. But hope springs eternal, in this case from the emergence of tools like the ANA's recently announced programmatic benchmarking offering and strategies to help us rethink the cost versus value trade-off and take radical steps (including by declaring independence from MFA) towards much more sustainable – and profitable – media.
Bear in mind too that MFA proliferation is just one of the 10 issues I'll be tackling in this series, building on the findings of the ANA's powerful research, which lays out the many ways that we can drive a better programmatic supply chain and increase the ROAS on your programmatic investments. See the introductory post to this series to find out more and, in the meantime, let me know your thoughts on MFA in particular and any other programmatic transparency issues you yourself are struggling to get a handle on – you can find me on LinkedIn.
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.
Lou Paskalis is CEO of AJL Advisory, focusing on helping marketers to improve their growth narrative. In addition, Lou is the chief strategy officer of Ad Fontes Media, dedicated to restoring advertisers' investments in journalism. Lou has been working with FiduciaDLT, the team that completed all of the work on The ANA Programmatic Transparency Study on behalf of TAG/TrustNet.