Yippee-Ki-Yay, MFA: Advertisers Dump Bogus Sites

A year after the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) kicked off the buzz at the 2023 Cannes Lions festival with the release of a report indicating that 15% of the media buys by major advertisers are spent on bogus, "made-for-advertising" (MFA) sites, the ad trade association is following up with a new report indicating such buys have fallen to 4% of total ad spending.

The finding, part of a just-released "Programmatic Transparency Benchmark Study," conducted by the ANA and Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG)'s TrustNet, analyzed log-level data for 31 billion programmatic ad impressions representing $211 million in ad spending by 11 major advertisers between January and May.

The 64% drop in ad budgets spent on MFA sites indicates "advertisers are taking greater control following heavy press coverage of last year’s study results," the ANA said, noting that "the average number of websites and apps on which campaigns run have also dropped from 44,000 to 23,000, and a high percentage of advertisers have reduced their number of SSP and exchange partners."

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The ANA and TAG TrustNet said they will be offering the new benchmark service to ANA members quarterly for an undisclosed limited time.

“This benchmark is meant to correct this imbalance, empowering brands to regain line of sight into their full programmatic supply chain and paving a crucial pathway to more effective decision-making that drives growth in the open web programmatic ecosystem," ANA CEO Bob Liodice said in a statement.

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