• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 19, 2023

On the heels of today's release of a damning Association of National Advertisers' report revealing the depth and breadth of programmatic ad spending on so-called "made-for-advertising" (MFA) websites, one of its authors, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) unveiled a new service to manage the problem.

The service -- a collaboration of TAG's TrustNet and Deepsee.io -- is part of a suite of new fraud mitigation, DEI and privacy compliance services TAG has aligned with, but the one with Deepsee.io is designed explicitly to provide a tool that advertisers can use to simply identity bogus MFA sites (see dashboard below), assess their risks, and create exclusion lists ensuring they are not part of a brand's programmatic ad spending.

"They have a list of MFA sites and we are partnering with them to make this list of MFA sites accessible on the TrustNet platform so marketers can do their diligence very easily," TAG CEO Mike Zaneis says, adding: "This all has to be automated and managed in real time."

Zaneis said the timing of the new service with the release of the ANA report is not coincidental, noting: "This report, and the subsequent report, are not just about saying, 'Hey, problem, problem, problem.' It's going to be about solutions, and this one seemed like an easy one for us to integrate right now into TrustNet."