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Recently, the programmatic industry has been coalescing around a new enemy, made for advertising (MFA) publishers. But, as with most of the problems within programmatic, the debate around MFA sites obscures the more important conversation: The proliferation, and continued transaction, of low-quality media.
Earlier this month, supply-side platform Sharethrough removed MFA sites from all its private marketplace (PMPs) and off-the-shelf deals (of which MFA inventory had made up 9%, according to a company spokesperson).
Last week, trade group the Association of National Advertisers released a report finding that 21% of the study’s 35.5 billion impressions landed on MFA websites, a finding that led the trade body to conclude that the programmatic media ecosystem is “rife with waste.”
Next week, SSP PubMatic will announce it’s eliminating MFA inventory from the auction packages it sells, senior director of marketplace quality Eric Bozinny told Adweek.
MFA sites, which have gained traction over the last two years, describe publishers that, while not fraudulent, game industry standards to appear as legitimate publishers, sources told Adweek. MFA sites often look as if they’ve been created by content farms and are full of junky content that people are more likely to be baited into reading, rather than purposefully seeking. Typically, traffic comes from content recommendation networks rather than organically.
Jounce Media, which several ad-tech firms rely on for their inventory quality standards, identifies MFA by high paid traffic dependence, high auctions per session and high viewability. Currently, there is no industry-wide standard for defining MFA sites.
While low-quality media is nothing new, the number of MFA sites is growing. And while, increasingly, SSPs and ad-tech firms are taking measured steps to remove MFA sites from the bidstream, sources say meaningful action needs to come from buyers, who can all too often be incentivized to buy media based on vanity metrics.
An old problem gets a new name
While the nomenclature is relatively new, the concept of low-quality publishers scamming advertisers has been around since the dawn of digital advertising.
“It’s old news. It’s got a snazzy acronym,” said Geoff Litwer, vp of programmatic & display media at performance marketing agency Tinuiti. “They’ve been around for the entirety of programmatic.”
Scammy publishers have persisted despite a bevy of industry initiatives in recent months aimed at helping buyers reach premium inventory more easily.
SPO is one of those band-aid solutions
Marc Guldimann, CEO of Adelaide
Since the beginning of 2022, The Trade Desk, Yahoo, Magnite and PubMatic have all launched supply-path optimization (SPO) programs to help shorten the journey between buyer and publisher, in part to ensure that the convoluted supply chain doesn’t prevent advertisers from buying quality content. More buyers are buying via private marketplaces to avoid low-quality publishers in the open exchange. Agencies are adopting media decarbonization plans, and publishers with lower carbon emissions are correlated with those of higher quality.
Yet, the problem of avoiding bad media, which lies at the root of all these initiatives, is only growing. MFA inventory has grown to 19% of the bidstream in late 2022 from 7.1% in early 2020, according to data from programmatic consultancy Jounce Media.
“There’s a lot of band-aid solutions in ad tech. People are skirting around the core issue of opaque quality,” said Marc Guldimann, CEO of attention metrics firm Adelaide. “SPO is one of those band-aid solutions.”
Cheap, viewable media maintains the status quo
Ironically, MFA publishers have grown out of other initiatives to improve media quality.
The ad inventory is viewable, brand safe and cheap, designed to meet standards buyers and content verification ad-tech firms have implemented in the past half-decade. Yet these sites rarely drive real-world business outcomes, said Chris Kane, CEO of Jounce Media.
“There is more and more consensus among industry insiders that [MFA] meets all the industry’s minimums but fails basic inventory quality standards,” Kane said. “It’s not fraud, but it’s tiptoeing close to fraud.”
Some buyers wish ad-tech firms would make avoiding MFA inventory as easy as clicking a button.
“Buyers should have a choice but right now [ad-tech firms] are not enabling buyers to have a choice because there is no signal,” denoting that the inventory is MFA in the bidstream, said Matt McIntyre, global head of programmatic at EssenceMediaCom. “Unless [buyers] check all the domains themselves, which is a massive task.”
McIntyre noted the WPP-owned agency is keen to eliminate MFA inventory from their buys.
It’s really up to the buyers to change their habits
Eric Bozinny, senior director of marketplace quality, PubMatic
Some buyers and publishers wish MFA was labeled in the open exchange, or better yet, eliminated altogether. But existing business dynamics make that a tricky proposal for SSPs, Kane said.
“If a single exchange were to wholesale cut ties they would lose a lot of revenue and would give a gift to their competitors,” Kane said. “Each individual exchange is highly disincentivized to turn off MFA inventory.”
Case in point, PubMatic’s Bozinny said that if all SSPs joined forces to ban MFA, they would be accused of collusion, but if one SSP took it upon themselves to remove MFA, they would suffer disproportionately.
“We would have a drop of revenue overnight and buyers would go to all the other SSPs for MFA,” Bozinny said, given that cheap MFA inventory helps marketers meet their performance goals. “It’s really up to the buyers to change their habits.”
Ad-tech firms reducing MFA
While SPO initiatives may get at the problem of low-quality inventory indirectly, ad-tech firms have taken some direct steps to eliminate MFA websites from their supply. A spokesperson for Index Exchange told Adweek that the SSP prohibits MFA inventory.
A Google spokesperson said Google prohibits “publishers to engage in disruptive, invasive or deceptive ad-serving practices simply for the purposes of generating ad revenue,” and in 2022 removed ads from serving on over 143,000 sites for violating Google’s policies.
[MFA] is the ‘feel-good, I can save time’ trick
Geoff Litwer, vp of programmatic & display media at Tinuiti
Sharethrough and PubMatic are launching initiatives to automatically remove MFA inventory from certain buying paths, though are not addressing the problem of MFA websites in the open exchange.
In early 2022, SSP OpenX gave buyers the option to exclude MFA inventory from PMPs and auction packages, said Matt Sattel, SVP of global buyer development. He said very few buyers have thus far shown interest.
“It’s really challenging,” Sattel said. “We’re going to remove the crummy MFA when ultimately MFA has strong results for buyers for these KPIs that people are being held to, like viewability.”
Tinuiti’s Litwer said that buyers currently have all the tools they need to mostly avoid MFA inventory, but that low-quality websites continue to exist because they help marketers fulfill vanity metrics without actually making for good advertising.
“If you have a marketer whose CFO assigns a budget based on a particular KPI, [MFA] makes [their] life so much easier,” Litwer said. “[MFA] is the ‘feel-good, I can save time’ trick.”
