Understanding MFA and supply chain quality
Since the advent of programmatic and automated buying, quality of the supply chain has always been critical. Now, it’s taking on increased importance given the sophistication of AI and the prevalence of MFA sites.
Let’s take a look at how marketers can proactively protect programmatic campaigns from MFA and fraud.
Marketers want to know campaigns are running in a brand-suitable environment with genuine and positive consumer experiences, and that all impressions are delivered to humans in highly viewable placements.
Though MFA is not fraud in the traditional sense, where bots generate invalid traffic or fake clicks, it is a new iteration where bad actors buy traffic and create a poor consumer experience by inflating ad density and ad refreshes to satisfy vanity metrics like viewability. These sites are designed primarily to generate ad revenue rather than creating legitimate, valuable content.
A decade ago, our ecosystem faced a similar scourge with fraudulent publishers flooding the market with bogus sites and traffic. Back then, we didn’t have the robust transparency standards that we have available today.
So, what is the solution for preventing MFA or other fraud?
Leverage sellers.json to protect programmatic campaigns
Media owners, marketers, and ad tech platforms all play a part in ensuring quality. Ultimately, SSPs need to remove MFA sites from their exchanges and redirect that ad spend to legitimate publishers. But media buyers can also protect their campaigns. Marketers have significant influence in the programmatic ecosystem and can drive change by carefully selecting where to allocate their budgets.
After all, avoiding programmatic advertising entirely is not a viable solution given the tremendous efficiency and value it drives.
We have more transparency in the programmatic marketplace today than ever before—the key is using existing tools to avoid any risks. Let’s dive in.
Today, every SSP discloses all the media owners and intermediaries that it pays through its exchange using sellers.json, a programmatic standard that the IAB Tech Lab finalized in 2019. It allows programmatic players to “follow the money” at scale by providing a framework to transparently track the payees behind ad impressions. It’s a publicly available file—for example, you can view Index’s by visiting Indexexchange.com/sellers.json.
Leveraging sellers.json, along with other transparency tools like ads.txt and SupplyChain object, will help you avoid buying inventory from MFA sites. An SSP’s sellers.json file will list media owners with their company name, domain, seller ID, and inventory type. So, you can reference sellers.json to verify all sellers involved in a bid request at the root publisher level, rather than solely at the domain level.
This is helpful in combating MFA as new domains appear all the time. Verifying the root publisher rather than individual domains will help you efficiently identify and remove sellers that support MFA.
It will also help eliminate MFA subdomains, which are increasingly common. These are legitimate premium publishers that allow a seller to operate an MFA subdomain, making it appear more legitimate and obfuscating the MFA content. These subdomains are most often run through MFA-specific sellers, not the publisher itself, so again, focusing on eliminating sellers rather than individual domains can help mitigate risk.
Cross reference sellers.json with SupplyChain and ads.txt to protect programmatic campaigns
Next, you can cross-reference sellers.json with ads.txt and SupplyChain to see the full picture and to help validate each hop and ensure every seller is authorized. These three tools are all key in helping you protect programmatic campaigns from harmful or fraudulent sites, yet each have distinct purposes. This distinction is particularly important when it comes to identifying and removing MFA.
Ads.txt is maintained by publishers to declare sellers that are authorized to sell their ad inventory. However, it doesn’t disclose the full supply path for each ad impression, including any authorized intermediaries participating in the sale. Sellers.json and SupplyChain go a step further as SSPs declare all parties involved in selling a publisher’s ad inventory.
That’s important as MFA is a moving target. If one domain is shut down today, another may pop up tomorrow. Or a domain may first appear as a legitimate publisher and pass quality audits, but later evolve into an MFA site that an SSP will remove from its exchange.
Industry reports of newly discovered MFA sites aim to keep pace and identify new sources of MFA. Relying on ads.txt alone for identification is inefficient and could result in outdated information.
For instance, an MFA site could still list one of its SSP partners in its ads.txt file, but that SSP may have terminated it from its exchange and removed it from its sellers.json file. Because different parties maintain these files, checking them all will help you identify any discrepancies.
Develop an allow list of preferred publishers
Next, consider shifting your strategy from block lists to developing an allow list, based on your objectives and the quality publishers you wish to invest in.
Today’s game of constant domain Whac-A-Mole is not working to eliminate MFA. Allow lists will be a more efficient way to ensure quality ad placements compared to trying to block ever-changing domains. Sellers.json will also be helpful here as it cites domains at the root publisher level.
Maintaining allow lists requires planning and intention, but it is effective, provides you with more control, and ensures a quality ad experience for your audience.
The pursuit of quality never ceases, and bad actors are constantly evolving to evade detection. Harness the tools available today to validate inventory sources and protect your investments. Be sure to work with your programmatic partners to engage only legitimate publishers that are worthy of your ad spend.
Together, we can all uphold quality throughout the supply chain and foster a more responsible and transparent ecosystem.
Learn more about our commitment to supply chain quality at Index Exchange.
