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Adalytics Report Torches Ad Tech For Touting MFA Prevention While Scarfing MFA Supply
Source: AdExchanger
March 11th, 2024
source: Adalytics
Summary: The ad tech industry talks a good game about wanting to get rid of garbage made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, but perverse incentives and a set-it-and-forget-it mentality ensure that MFAs remain a staple in the media supply chain. In its latest bombshell report, ad transparency research company Adalytics took a closer look at MFA inventory, which has become something of an industry boogeyman after an ANA study found that these low-quality websites gobble up 15% of ad spend. While numerous demand-side and supply-side platforms made pledges to weed out MFA inventory, it seems as though few have actually done so.
Google’s demand side platform DV360 is the biggest buyer and seller of MFAs. Amazon’s retail media network (and other retail media networks) are major offenders too, as they rely heavily on view-based attribution from product-focused ads anywherethey can serve them to users. Microsoft Ads and Xandr were also near the top of the naughty list. Many SSPs that announced they would work with industry partners to identify and filter out MFA inventory are still serving ads on MFA sites. On the other hand, companies like The Trade Desk, Kargo, TrustX, and Ozone Project have done a great job of eradicating MFAs from their platforms.
There are several key factors at play, Adalytics says. Some platforms may not monitor MFAs regularly to stay on top of constantly changing zombie domain URLs. SSPs that remove MFAs have to face declining reach and higher CPMs, and DSPs turn a blind eye because their clients demand reach at impractically low CPMs. So while it's technically possible to remove MFAs (and per Adalytics, not all that difficult), many programmatic platforms simply don't do it because it hurts marketer performance and lowers spend.
Opinion: Funny how the original promise of programmatic was buying cheap audience reach on long-tail sites at scale instead of buying expensive pockets of media directly from publishers. Now we call a lot of that cheap reach MFA because we’ve realized it has no actual value to consumers or advertisers. The question is, how do we make it so that it doesn’t have value to publishers and ad tech companies so we can get rid of it?
This is a classic ad industry problem: we get up on panels and at conferences on our soapboxes and spend all our time talking about societal topics like DE&I, a free and open internet, funding journalism, carbon emissions, fraud, and MFAs. Then we go back to our dark dungeons of advertising and spend all of our time thinking about how to make money. What we talk about and what we do are not aligned. In fact, a lot of times, they are at odds. We don’t necessarily like that we do this, and frankly, sometimes we don’t even know that we’re doing it. But we do it, because, you know, capitalism.
Everyone agrees on the solution: fix the incentives! Get rid of flawed metrics like clicks and CPMs and view-based conversions and reach and viewability, and the garbage goes away. Easy to say, harder to do. First of all, we have to find all the “right” metrics to replace these traditional metrics and then we have to measure properly. No one has quite figured that out yet. But we can surely do better. Second, we have to overcome immense inertia. That requires lots and lots of education, fundamentally changing how people think, how systems work, how organizations function, how many billions of dollars are transacted. Another solution is public shaming. It’s a pretty shameless industry, so this probably won’t work, but we can try. Here’s the Adalytics MFA Hall of Shame:
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