There's Only One Person To Blame For This MFA Mess - The CMO

Advertising

Mar 17

Another week, another laughably embarrassing report on the ad tech industry. In case you haven't seen it - after dinging YouTube multiple times this year, the analytics firm Adalytics released another bombshell report - this time focused on the preponderance of 'Made for Advertising' (MFA) sites, and the ad tech ecosystem’s alleged complicity in their ability to thrive. For the uninformed, MFAs are essentially websites whose sole purpose is to drive up clicks on or exposure to digital ads. Most don't have any inherent content or utility value, but are set up to pop up in ad exchanges and supply platforms - steering millions of brands' dollars in their direction by working the programmatic system. Many in the ad world have decried their existence, including many ad tech leaders. but as Adalytics found, these sites are thriving thanks in part to many big ad tech players.

That's not that shocking really. But what remains puzzling is that despite the usual finger pointing, the brands - most prominently the CMOs - continue to skate on this issue. In fact, its been almost trendy among many CMOs to feign ignorance about how these things happen, and how programmatic actually works, while letting agencies and ad tech firms take the fall. Meanwhile, it's the CMOs who allocate budgets, pay for third party firms to keep them away from this sort of trouble and then constantly push for cheaper prices with smaller budgets each quarter. It would be a real surprise if we saw a CMO actually taking a firm, active role in trying to suss this problem out.