The MFA site traffic craze was a hot topic in ad tech last year. Many questioned: are all MFA sites bad? What exactly distinguishes what an MFA site is? At the time of the craze, MFA sites made up 15% of global programmatic ad spend, but agencies were working to combat them, much like AdLib and Jounce, and are working on them now. 

In a strategic move to enhance the quality and effectiveness of programmatic advertising, AdLib Media Group has announced a partnership with Jounce Media by integrating its MFA detection technology. 

In an effort to guarantee that advertisers focus their media investments on premium publishers to drive real consumer engagement, AdLib is providing agencies with tools to optimize their digital ad spend by connecting Jounce Media’s advanced MFA detection technology to automatically block low-quality traffic. 

“MFA websites are a growing threat to advertiser success. By integrating Jounce Media’s technology, we can safeguard client campaigns against wasted media investment,” said Mike Hauptman,founder and CEO of AdLib.. 

Jounce Media President Chris Kane echoed this sentiment. If the industry proactively blocks low-quality traffic, it ensures that media investments go toward genuine publishers that influence consumer purchase decisions.

Mike Hauptman: The Future of Programmatic Advertising

Andrew Byrd: Why did AdLib partner with Jounce Media specifically to block MFA traffic? What stood out about their solution?

Mike Hauptman: We partnered with Jounce Media because their approach to detecting and blocking MFA traffic is both innovative and reliable. 

What really stood out to us was their ability to dynamically identify and classify MFA sites, ensuring that we’re always one step ahead of the curve. 

They don’t just rely on static lists—they continuously update and refine their detection methods, which is crucial given how quickly MFA sites can evolve. This level of precision and their commitment to transparency made them the perfect fit for AdLib, where our goal is to deliver the highest quality media experiences for our clients.

AB: How does this partnership align with AdLib’s broader mission and strategy within the programmatic advertising space?         

MH: This partnership is a natural extension of our mission to make premium programmatic advertising accessible to all agencies, regardless of size. Our strategy has always been about reducing complexity and increasing transparency in the ad buying process. 

By integrating Jounce Media’s technology, we’re ensuring that our clients can trust the inventory quality they’re purchasing. It’s about removing the guesswork and inefficiencies that have long plagued programmatic, particularly for mid-market agencies that don’t have the resources to tackle these issues on their own.

AB: What impact do you expect this partnership to have on your client’s campaign performance and overall media investment?

MH: The impact is going to be significant. By automatically blocking MFA traffic, our clients will see a reduction in wasted ad spend and an improvement in campaign performance. MFA sites are notorious for inflating metrics without delivering real value, so by eliminating them, we’re ensuring that our clients’ budgets are directed toward high-quality, impactful placements. This not only boosts performance metrics like engagement and conversion rates but also enhances brand safety and reputation. 

AB: How do you plan to further enhance AdLib’s DSP platform with similar integrations in the future?         

MH: We’re always looking for ways to bring best-in-class tools and technologies to our platform. The Jounce partnership is just the beginning. Moving forward, we plan to integrate additional solutions that address other pain points in the programmatic space. Our focus is on building a platform that’s not only powerful but also easy to use, so our clients can focus on strategy and creativity rather than the technicalities of media buying.

AB: What steps will AdLib take to educate and onboard clients about this new feature and ensure they fully leverage its benefits?

MH: The beauty of this integration is that it’s completely turnkey and automatically enabled for all AdLib clients at no additional cost. There’s no setup required—clients will immediately benefit from enhanced ad quality without lifting a finger. We’ll also provide insights through the platform to highlight the positive impact on their campaigns.

AB: Are there any initial testing results to share after Jounce integrated its MFA detection tech into your DSP?

MH: While we’re still in the early stages of gathering comprehensive data, the initial results from our beta testing have been very promising. We’ve already seen a noticeable decrease in MFA traffic, leading to a more efficient ad spend allocation and improved campaign outcomes. We’re excited to share more detailed results as we collect data.

Chris Kane: Accelerating the Shift Toward Premium Supply

AB: We’ve discussed the MFA problem. What is the current state of Made for Advertising sites from your perspective? Has the ad tech industry gotten better at eliminating MFAs?

Chris Kane: Because MFA publishers are highly dependent on paid traffic, the availability of MFA supply is extremely responsive to buyer behavior. As buyers spend more on MFA inventory, those publishers can afford to buy more paid traffic. And as buyers pull back their spending on MFA sites, those publishers can no longer profitably buy traffic. 

The result was a giant run-up in the availability of MFA supply from 2020 through mid-2023, peaking at 30% of all web auctions. But as marketers have implemented MFA blocking solutions, MFA has contracted to less than 10% of web auctions. Still, MFA is a very large share of available supply, and buyers need to actively manage whether they participate in MFA auctions.

AB: Please remind us how Jounce Media developed the technology to accurately identify and block MFA sites. Can you walk us through the process?

CK: We post our criteria for classifying inventory as MFA here. We perform a battery of tests every day on every RTB-traded website to quantify whether each domain meets our criteria for MFA classification. Based on that daily-updating process, we regularly add and remove sites from our MFA list, and AdLib will now similarly continuously modify their default exclusion list to block new sources of MFA supply and re-enable bidding on sites that have retooled their operations to create a premium advertising experience.

AB: How does Jounce Media differentiate between MFA sites and legitimate publishers that might have similar characteristics?

CK: In addition to the process described above, we publish our complete MFA list to all of our clients via dashboards and data feeds on a daily-updating cadence. There are over 3,000 advertising professionals from over 100 companies that have direct access to our data, making our MFA list far more transparent and far more pressure tested than any other solution in the market.

AB: In your opinion, how will this partnership with AdLib impact the broader industry’s approach to MFA supply?

CK: In addition to benefiting their clients, AdLib’s decision to block MFA supply by default will accelerate an industry-wide shift toward premium supply. SSPs feed DSPs what they eat. 

When buyers shift their spending patterns away from MFA supply toward premium publishers, SSPs reshape the mix of ad opportunities that they make available to DSPs. Premium publishers are more available in the bidstream today than they were last summer, and AdLib’s decision to block MFA will accelerate this trend.

AB: What are the next steps for Jounce Media to improve and expand its technology to identify low-quality traffic?

CK: We are continuously researching new sources of supply chain inefficiency and new opportunities to deploy RTB investments more effectively. Among other topics, we are currently studying the landscape of in-stream video, benchmarks on ad density, and the accuracy of user targeting signals.

AB: Can you share any initial testing results after integrating your MFA detection tech into AdLib’s DSP?

CK: In July 2023, MFA bid request volume was at 30% but has since decreased to 10%. Through their partnership, AdLib and Jounce are committed to implementing best practices to reduce this percentage further.

The post AdLib Media Group and Jounce Media Join Forces to Combat MFA Traffic appeared first on AdMonsters.

For many people it seemed like an allusive fantasy: A single DSP that could interact seamlessly with all DSPs, enabling media buyers to launch and optimize campaigns from a single interface and acquire inventory through whichever platform is best suited to achieve campaign KPIs.

Then came the bankruptcy of MediaMath and the idea of a universal DSP took on new urgency as media buyers were forced to learn new interfaces in a matter of days.

Long before MediaMath shut down, however, Mike Hauptman and Dan Bougourd were intrigued by the idea of a meta DSP. They both joined MediaMath in the company’s early days, but by 2018, they were itching to bring programmatic advertising to the mid-market advertiser.

They pitched the idea of spinning off a new company that would offer a meta DSP built on top of MediaMath to their bosses, who were game. That year they launched AdLib, a DSP designed to bring programmatic advertising to the SMB market through streamlined workflows.

Mike Haupman met with AdMonsters to talk about meta DSPs and the drivers that led them to build and launch one.

AdMonsters: You and Dan are programmatic old-timers. When did you first join MediaMath?

Mike Haupman: I joined MediaMath back in 2010 when the company launched the first self-service DSP. I was the first sales engineer and spent the next seven years building and leading the Global Technology Solutions team. Dan joined a year after me, in a similar role, supporting the expansion into the EMEA region.

Launching AdLib — A Meta DSP

AdMonsters: What made you and Dan decide to launch a new company?

MH: We wanted to make DSP advertising easy. The first tagline of AdLib was, “The Premium DSP for Everyone.” We saw the challenges that media buyers faced trying to access premium ad platforms such as MediaMath and others.

For media buyers at any size agency, it’s a complex business to learn a DSP interface, set up campaigns, and optimize them on an ongoing basis. And doing things like automation and scaling is incredibly resource-intensive. Now increase that complexity by factors when trafficking campaigns across multiple DSPs.

For midsize buyers, those obstacles are formidable. On top of this, they faced additional barriers to entry in the form of commercial commitments and large monthly and annual spend minimums.  These challenges combined to effectively bar midsize marketers from participating in programmatic advertising.

AdMonsters: To encourage widespread participation, you started by building a DSP for midsized marketers on top of MediaMath?

MH: Yes, at the time Dan and I were both intimately familiar with MediaMath’s APIs and customizing them. We wanted to explore new options and scratch our entrepreneurial itch, so we approached the MediaMath founders to see how they felt about us launching a really easy-to-use version of MediaMath. That’s what we did. Today, marketers of all sizes use AdLib as a meta DSP to launch and manage campaigns on top DSPs across all channels & screens

AdMonsters: Talk a little more about the concept of a meta DSP. What is it, and is it your goal to put all of the other DSPs out of business?

MH: Our goal is to work with all of the DSPs, leveraging the best of all worlds on behalf of our clients. 

The industry has talked about a meta DSP for a long time, which is a single interface that allows the user to login and run media across whichever DSP or DSPs are best suited to meet the object of the campaign.

For instance, if it’s a CTV campaign, Beeswax is a great option thanks to its efficient connections to CTV supply. If it’s a performance-based campaign Criteo is the way to go, because that platform is just incredible at driving performance-based programs across display and video.

A big benefit of a meta DSP lies in the opportunity to have a simple workflow tool. The meta DSP serves as the system of record for users, and they use the simple interface to build and manage campaigns, but AdLib, not the user, determines the best DSP to activate the campaign and manages the connections, gathers the reporting, and displays the consolidated results in a dashboard.

AdMonsters: So media buyers are still using multiple DSPs, but doing so through one interface?

MH: That’s right. Media buyers today access multiple DSPs so they can maximize results and minimize the risks of missing key audiences. But ask any of them and they’ll tell you it’s a time-consuming and error-prone process to set up campaigns in each one.

From an AdOps perspective, adoption, trafficking, and workflows are very different. It takes a lot of investment to teach people multiple systems, and employee churn leads to a loss of those investments.

The other challenge a meta DSP addresses is business continuity if a DSP, like MediaMath, goes dark. This is a reality that a lot of media buyers faced this past June.

Dynamically-Allocated Budgets

AdMonsters: How does AdLib determine the best way to allocate budget for a campaign?

MH: We’re building out a concept we call dynamically allocated budgets. Essentially, we look at the DSPs that are delivering the strongest performance per campaign and focus media spend there.

Let’s say a user sets up a campaign with a CPA goal of $10.00. The system will allocate 50% of the budget to one DSP 50% and the other 50% on another. AdLib will then determine over time which DSP or which set of DSPs delivers the best results for that budget. We further fine-tune the performance with media-mix modeling, as well as dark market / light market testing.

The concept of cross-DSP segmentation is something we’re still testing and developing.

AdMonsters: What is dark market and light market testing?

MH: Let’s say you start with two markets that are relatively similar in terms of size and demographics. Historically, media buyers run media in both markets with similar budgets and benchmarks. In other words, the buyer tests DSP A and market A and DSP B and market B. After a bit, the buyer compares the results to determine which market got the best lift from its baseline, and ultimately, which DSP drives better performance.

A meta DSP improves on this important process in a few ways. First and foremost, it eliminates the potential of user overlap, as the tests occur in different markets. Second, agencies can assess performance without holdout testing, or using pixels to segment users, which gets really messy really fast. Dark market vs. light market testing is cleaner and delivers a stronger signal without the complexity we normally associate with market comparisons.

AdMonsters: How has MediaMath’s bankruptcy affected your business?

MH: Prior to June we primarily worked with midsize media agencies, but since integrating with more DSPs beyond MediaMath, we have begun working with larger agencies. They’ve been receptive to AdLib because they too are struggling with the fragmentation and the soaring labor costs that are part and parcel of using multiple DSPs for their campaigns.

Publishers Get Audience Extension and Scale with AdLib

AdMonsters: Do publishers use your platform?

MH: Yes, publishers use our platform for audience extension services, which has traditionally been a highly labor-intensive task. There’s a lot of manual labor involved in finding their buyer’s audiences on the open web. A meta DSP automates this for publisher AdOps teams.

We’ve worked with several publishers in audience extension services where no humans were involved whatsoever. These campaigns are simply marked for amplification or extension, and they flow the platform and are activated across the appropriate DSP. Think of it as audience-extension-in-a-box.

AdMonsters: This sounds like a great way to scale campaigns without cookies.

MH: We definitely see a future for first-party data activation.

AdMonsters: And speaking of the future, a meta DSP seems like a good way to future-proof the media buyer’s ad ops.

MH: That’s true. While DSPs may come or go, the trafficker needs to worry about just one interface.

About Mike Hauptman – CEO & Founder – AdLib

Mike is a programmatic marketer with over 17 years of experience solving complex and large-scale technical business challenges for Fortune 500 brands, agencies, and advertisers.

Prior to founding AdLib, Mike was one of the first 100 employees at MediaMath, where he held various roles, including VP of Technical Business Development and Global VP of Platform Integrations.

The post Making Programmatic Easier for All with a Meta DSP appeared first on AdMonsters.