MFA

From avoiding AI slop to achieving show-level transparency on a CTV buy, we talk through how buyers are supercharging performance by focusing on the content where they place their ads.

This year, the percentage of ad spend going toward made-for-advertising (MFA) sites went up instead of down for the first time since 2023.

Goodway Group has reduced the number of SSPs it works with from about 20 at the end of 2024 to just single digits today.

An upcoming paper from CIMM doesn’t just demonstrate that differences in media quality can be measured. It also argues that tying media value to short-term outcomes has perpetuated longstanding industry challenges.

If a buyer wants real control, “domain rationalization” alone will never be enough. Buyers need “bid rationalization,” shaping the supply at the bid-request level so they see fewer, better, more outcome-relevant opportunities.

For years, MFA was a mostly web-based problem. Now, generative AI has supercharged the made-for-advertising model, and it’s infecting social media feeds and vertical video platforms.

DMG Media has a new social-focused agency services biz; AI search and AI slop sites are cannibalizing recipe sites; and a new TikTok trend blasts brands for not delivering free stuff they didn’t promise.

Lesser-known browser Brave comes out of the woodwork; agentic chatbots require new ad practices; and private equity can endanger both brands and publishers.

The real challenge is drawing a clear line between the AI-generated content that adds value and the kind that erodes trust and leads to significantly lower ad effectiveness.

Our industry has done a terrible job rewarding publishers for monetization choices that align their supply to quality and outcomes vs. short-term yield bumps. But is it overly optimistic to think The Trade Desk’s recent moves prove that’s changing?

Mike Hauptman, co-founder of AdLib, discusses the company’s evolution and how AI is changing the future of both AdLib and ad tech as a whole.

Google’s DV360 adding attention as optimization signal could finally help wean buyers and platforms off bidding on ad inventory based on viewability.

Equativ is now blocking made-for-advertising content from all exchange activity, marking a larger trend of pushing to eliminate MFA sites.

The Brand Safety Institute is expanding its publisher transparency initiative to include new media quality assessments, including data compliance.

Programmatic bidding algorithms aren’t always aligned with campaign goals, so agencies are relying on AI tech to create algorithms tailored to their campaigns instead.

Based on the way advertisers deal with publishers, you’d think they were sworn enemies. Our failure to prioritize collaboration on the open web and build a positive value chain has been our collective downfall.

To zero in on premium inventory, The Trade Desk is analyzing metadata signals about ad placements and pushing adoption of its alternative ID. It’s also betting the farm on CTV.

The Brand Safety Institute released a new tool that lets publishers check whether their site domains have been flagged as MFA by third-party verification vendors.

The industry’s sharpest minds claim we are entering the Outcomes Era of digital advertising. But we have been in the Outcomes Era for over a decade. It is high time to embrace the Quality Era, instead.

The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees. Here’s how pubs and their ad tech partners can punch back in the years ahead.

In response to shifting ad industry trends, A360 Media abandoned its made-for-advertising model four years ago and streamlined its site design to court programmatic demand.

Two perspectives have emerged on curation: The value argument highlights refined audience targeting, while the ad network argument emphasizes enabling smaller players to compete with scaled giants.

Brands’ relentless drive for efficiency in media spending has far-reaching consequences that have significantly reshaped the industry and perpetuated longstanding issues with media quality.

Advertisers’ obsession with “following the audience” allowed low-quality sites and vanity metrics to thrive while brand integrity suffers. But a cultural shift back toward focusing on quality is underway.

Solutions that fundamentally address the issues curation attempts to solve already exist. The problem is that none of these solutions have been adopted by the buy side.

Historically, media buying has been all about scale, even if it meant outrageously false population counts on audience segments. 

Freestar adopted a new approach to curation developed by Audigent that gives buyers a priority lane to publisher inventory with higher viewability and attention scores than most open-auction inventory.

By implementing the anti-MFA playbook detailed in the ANA’s November report, brands were able to reduce the portion of their programmatic budgets going to made-for-advertising sites to about 1%.

By applying Adelaide’s Attention Unit scoring, buyers can target low-, medium- and high-attention inventory via TTD’s self-serve platform.

Albert Thompson, a buy-side veteran with 20+ years of experience, weighs in on attention metrics, the value of MFA sites, brand safety backlash and how publishers can improve their inventory.