The MFA saga continues…I keep hearing buy side entities allude to the choice
to serve on MFA. Wait, what? Don’t they want to stop buying the thing they also condemn?
These choices stem from goal balancing. Whether it’s cost, reach or behaviour, MFA is consciously purchased. It’s not explicitly targeted or sought after…it’s just not necessarily excluded.
Believe it or not, even in 2024, “the best” digital inventory isn’t simply available on the open market, nor is it cheap.
The best can mean brand power, subject authority, scale, format, user relationship and so on. We often assume the best comes from specific, mature, large, sought after publications. Well, these pubs don’t just give it all up for free on the open market. A strong brand with scale usually direct sells which consumes their most valuable inventory; relegating the open market to remnant fill that is still relatively expensive but potentially less performant because it’s deeper in the funnel.
Cookies have created a data leakage nightmare for many of these top tier pubs. Advertisers buy their media for a premium price to cookie the user and retarget them downstream for a fraction of the original cost of the user.
Let’s say I buy an impression from a prominent site with a $40 rate card and classify that user’s interest with a cookie. The data could be very juicy like in market intent for specific products or services. I then buy that user on ilovearbitrage.com for a 30c cpm. Well I just saved myself 130x my original cost for the same audience (insert 8 bit level up sound effect here). As a buyer I can say I delivered both the high value site and the audience extension from that site for a great deal!
Now let’s go one crazy step further and posture that the original, quality site creates their own MFA experience to funnel the leaked spend back to their own pocket. Similar to a luxury brand stealing a bunch of knock off purses and selling them to the consumers who were only ever going to buy a knock off of their products. Selling them as the real thing for thousands of dollars is fraud. Selling them as knockoffs to users looking for knockoffs under a shell company is also fraud. Creating the knockoffs in the first place is definitely fraud. This is where ad tech diverges - it’s perfectly acceptable and standard practice to take a publisher’s data and use it to buy other companies’ media who don’t share any level of business context. Totally why we can’t have nice things 🙄
I really do believe 3rd party cookie deprecation with help a lot. MFA sites won’t have authenticated traffic to extend from premium domains. Yay 🎉
However, that doesn’t mean buyers will turn off the MFA button. That choice will really come down to inventory cost/performance dynamics.