‘MFA should stand for made-for-arbitrage’: An oral history of the murky made-for-advertising crusade

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Love them, hate them or tolerate them, “made-for-advertising” sites have had targets on their backs since the early summer, causing media buyers, advertisers and SSPs to make sweeping proclamations that they were blocking any and all MFAs from their programmatic ad buys.

Last fall, a loose definition that included some criteria for identifying MFA sites was created by a group of trade organizations. It was intended for the definition to be open to interpretation as a way to give buyers flexibility to determine their level of tolerance for things like paid traffic, according to the involved organizations: the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA).

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