How Magnite Helps Buyers Navigate Made-For-Advertising to Drive Brand Impact

The marked increase in Made-For-Advertising (MFA) sites is of growing concern for digital marketers. While these sites can have attractive metrics on paper, including lower costs, higher volume, and great viewability metrics, often times it’s at the expense of the user and ad experience. These sites are great for achieving certain KPIs, but not necessarily driving business outcomes.

The prevalence of MFA sites has captured greater industry attention in the wake of ANA’s recent claim that they account for 21 percent of all impressions — suggesting advertisers are not in control of media placement decisions. This highlights a troubling trend in the industry, where the quest to win impressions has overshadowed the focus on quality media.

As the largest independent SSP in the world, Magnite is uniquely positioned to help our partners access curated supply at scale, in premium, high-impact environments. Here’s what advertisers need to know about MFAs and how Magnite helps ensure that ad budgets drive ROAs with top-tier publishers.

MFA sites are growing – posing an immediate challenge for marketers. 

Advertiser pushback against MFA sites points to a broader, perhaps more prescient conversation around the importance of curated supply in today’s sprawling digital marketplace. Programmatic display ad spend alone has more than doubled in the last four years, putting a newfound focus on content quality as bad actors have sought to exploit budgets with cheap, low-quality media.

Magnite is a firm believer in transparency and providing information to buyers to make informed buying decisions. This can be accomplished in real-time auctions and also via education and awareness measures. It’s important to note that MFA sites are not universally defined within the industry so it can be hard to understand where exactly different parties “draw-the-line.” At Magnite, at a minimum, we ensure that all inventory made available meet our core standards. 

From here, we lean on buyers to decide what criteria meet their media goals and implement those decisions through either curation or their bidder technology. As such, it may be a part of a buyer’s strategy to incorporate MFA sites in their media buys, valuing the inventory according to its business outcomes. For example, if MFA gives 10% of the expected business outcomes, only value an impression at 10% of your standard CPM. If it drives no business outcome – don’t buy it.

Magnite leads the way in protecting buyers from MFA sites and poor-quality media. 

Magnite blocks inventory that participates in unsafe traffic acquisition tactics as well as MFA inventory from Magnite’s auction packages and Magnite-Sourced DIDs. In addition, we are taking the following actions:

• Magnite provides buyers with guidance on how they can audit and block MFA websites from their Open Market media buys if they choose to.
• Working closely with DSPs to meet campaign goals while avoiding MFAs.
• Partnering with Jounce Media, Similarweb, and others to identify MFA and low-quality sites and tag them accordingly within Magnite.

These measures are in line with our broader commitment to combat fraud, and to uphold brand safety and inventory quality.

Magnite helps buyers make informed decisions about their media buys. 

As a philosophy, we believe in putting buyers in full control of their business decisions, armed with transparent insights, as opposed to categorically banning a certain type of media from our platform. By offering our buyers flexibility, they can tailor media buys to their specific KPIs, with the assurance they are buying inventory in brand-safe, premium environments. 

Our Demand Facilitation team works closely with clients to find the most direct, efficient pathways to high-quality media with organic audiences. At Magnite, we aim to provide transparency to buyers so they have a clear understanding of what they’re purchasing and where. 

It’s easy to chase the golden goose of low-price, high-volume inventory – but this can come at the expense of quality. MFA sites may appear to generate a lot of impressions, yet do not achieve impactful outcomes.

As a leader in curating and packaging omnichannel supply at scale, Magnite is dedicated to safeguarding the interests of our partners and fostering a transparent and healthy ecosystem – one committed to quality media.