Commentary by Bill Duggan , June 17, 2024
CANNES, France -- ANA, in partnership with TAG TrustNet, has released early findings from our first quarterly Programmatic Transparency Benchmark Study. And real progress has been made!
In 2023 we released the ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study; the initial report at Cannes and the follow-up/complete report in December. The purpose of that work was to make investments in programmatic advertising work harder with a greater percentage of spend resulting in an ad that the consumer has the opportunity to see. But we can’t just drop a 125-page report and walk away. We made the commitment to keep the conversation going and track progress (or lack of it) with an on-going quarterly benchmark report. Initial results of that first report are positive.
Perhaps the major finding of the 2023 study was the significant (and shocking) amount of spend in Made for Advertising (MFA) websites. MFA sites typically have most or all of these characteristics – high ad-to-content ratio, rapidly auto-refreshing ad placements, high percentage of paid traffic sourcing, generic content that is often dated and not unique, and poor design. Yet MFA sites can fool advertisers as they look good on metrics such as cost (CPMs are generally 25% lower), viewability, IVT, and video completion rates.
In the 2023 study, some 21% of impressions and 15% of spend was in MFA sites. That surprised lots of people, and the industry responded with solutions to address that.
Jounce Media previously provided the third-party validation that MFA supply as a percent of all web bid requests dropped in half between the release of the initial ANA report in late June 2023 and March 2024. Now, in this new benchmark, ANA can confirm that we have also seen a significant drop in ad spending delivered on MFA websites – from 15% in our 2023 study to 4% now. Clearly, our work has had an impact.
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