UPDATE: March 11, 2024: Amazon defended its DSP and said the platform makes it easier for advertisers to access third-party exchanges serving ads on the open web, per an announcement shared by an organization spokesperson following this story’s publication.
“We maintain a high bar on the availability that is out there for our advertisers and proactively block made-for-advertising inventory available through a mixture of manual and automatic processes,” the statement continues. “We also enable advertisers to resolve where their ads appear through a mixture of proprietary and third-party controls.”
- Ads from top brand marketers like Procter & Gamble, Hershey and Mondelez International continue to appear on click-bait Made for Advertising (MFA) web sites despite recent pledges by ad-tech and media firms to crack down on the issue, according to a latest report from Adalytics.
- Leading supply- and demand-side platforms (SSPs and DSPs), including offerings from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, together with a lot of retail media networks transact on MFA inventory, Adalytics alleges. Media agencies from all seven of the key ad-holding corporations were also implicated within the practice.
- MFAs have been within the highlight following a damning study from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) from June that exposed an enormous amount of wasted programmatic ad spend. Brands are concerned that MFAs hurt credibility and consumer trust while leading to worse business outcomes.
In the wake of the ANA’s programmatic transparency report last summer, there was a deluge of pledges to get tough on MFAs from all stripes of ad-tech vendors and media agencies. Just a couple of months after MFAs became a hot topic, programmatic stakeholders appeared confident they were on the best track toward an answer. Adalytics’ latest research indicates that a lot of those proclamations can have been lip service as brand marketers are still seeing their dollars wasted on web sites with sensationalist headlines, questionable content and janky designs.
The scope of corporations allegedly continuing to transact around MFAs is wide-ranging. DSPs named within the lengthy report include Google Display & Video 360, Amazon DSP, Roku OneView and AdTheorent, while Google Ad Manager, Criteo, Microsoft Xandr, Magnite and Pubmatic were among the many ad exchanges and SSPs. Agencies from all of the key ad-holding groups, including the massive 4 of Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic Group and WPP, were represented.
Adalytics fingered retail media networks as a significant offender, calling out Amazon’s platform, specifically, as an offender. Amazon’s promoting operations have faced scrutiny recently following a portion of an antitrust criticism against the e-commerce giant that alleged executives welcomed “defect” ads to run on its platform.
Marketing Dive has reached out to Amazon and Google for comment on the Adalytics report and can update this story pending a response.
The Trade Desk and Walmart DSP, which the retailer built on top of The Trade Desk’s tech, weren’t seen transacting on MFAs, an element Adalytics attributed to the DSP’s tighter inventory policies. Kargo, TrustX and Ozone Project were a number of the other corporations that were clear of MFA offenses.
An industry has burgeoned around intermediaries that work to ensure digital ads only appear on high-quality, brand-safe web sites. But Adalytics noted that many ads running on MFAs carry measurement and verification tags from vendors like Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Oracle Moat and Pixalate.
With generic domains like daily-stuff.com and followsports.com, MFAs use shady tactics to mask their purpose, hiding from search engines like google or showing a special web experience when visited directly to read as more legitimate. Paid traffic and suggestion platforms like Outbrain and Taboola help prop up pages that otherwise see virtually no organic reader interest.
MFAs depend on junk content and are built to be blanketed with display and video ads, rapidly refreshing placements to maximize exposure. Because MFAs don’t employ the same old ad frequency capping safeguards, brands that appear on them pays “astronomically high prices to reach a single consumer,” according to Adalytics. The researcher pointed to a Kroger campaign that saw the grocery store pay an efficient CPM of $5,491 to reach one person via an MFA.
Adalytics used several methods to track which brands, government entities and nonprofits were still seeing campaigns run on MFAs in 2024. Sixteen of the 17 marketers that were disclosed as participating within the ANA’s first look report, including Molson Coors, Dell and State Farm, had ad impressions served on web sites that may very well be classified as MFAs based on definitions shared by trade organizations and watchdog groups. Furthermore, 80% of SSPs invited to take part in a showcase for suppliers hosted by the ANA earlier in March were confirmed to be serving ads for member marketers of the trade body on MFA sites.
The Adalytics study is peppered with statements and media interviews with firms that claim to be doing more to tamp down on MFAs, drawing contrast with their behavior. For instance, Pubmatic was found by Adalytics to have transacted ads for over 7,500 brands on the sample of MFA sites analyzed this 12 months. Meanwhile, a blog post published by Pubmatic in June, titled “Advancing Responsible Media By Removing MFA Inventory From Auction Packages,” was previously deleted or made inaccessible.
Read the total article here
