Brand Safety 101: Navigating the Dangers of MFA Sites

Brand safety issues aren’t slowing down anytime soon. This past year, 75% of brands reported being exposed to at least one brand-unsafe issue. 

We’ve covered why contextual relevance and brand safety matter before, but with the rise of issues like political unrest or the uptick in objectionable content, it’s critical to home in on why brand safety is important on a more granular level. This week, let’s focus on brand safety and the rise of Made for Advertising (MFA) sites.


What is Brand Safety?

Brand safety refers to the upkeep of your brand’s reputation when you advertise online. 

In other words, are the environment and contextual relevance of your ad maintaining your product and brand ethos? 

 
 

Contextually irrelevant ad placements are a risk in the age of programmatic advertising. If your product appears on an unrelated, vertical-averse page, consumer association, purchase intent, and overall perception can see significant decline.

Consumer buying journeys are driven by awareness, consideration, and opportunities for conversion - ensuring your contextual relevance and brand safety in each one of those steps is a critical strategy, especially with the rise of MFA sites.

What Are MFA Sites?

Made for Advertising sites are low-quality sites with one primary goal: Maximize ad impressions. This race for impressions comes at the cost of content quality, with tactics like pop-up ads and intrusive ads being used.

Content quality on these sites ranges from generic to irrelevant. The user experience on MFA sites is secondary to their goal of generating profit through ad placements.

Even though they accounted for just 2% of unique sites, MFA sites drew in 13% of total programmatic ad spend worldwide. This number is up 2% from last year. It’s clear that programmatic waste and the prevalence of irrelevant and harmful advertising sites continue to be persistent issues - issues that the advertising industry has yet to fully address.

For advertisers and brands, MFA sites pose major risks. Major players like Forbes have even been caught operating MFAs.  Brands may inadvertently place ads on these sites through programmatic channels, harming their brand safety, contextual relevance, and campaign performance. Let’s dive deeper into some of the risks associated with advertising on MFA sites and brand unsafe environments.

 
 

Three Risks of Advertising on MFA Sites

1. Wasted Impressions

MFA sites often draw users through misleading or clickbait content, resulting in ad impressions that ultimately fail to retain engagement. 

Because the content is designed primarily to host ads and maximize impressions - regardless of the content theme itself - users are unlikely to feel the products being advertised are relevant to them, leading to wasted impressions. This hinders the overall efficiency of ad campaigns, and puts ad dollars to inefficient use.

2. Brand Safety

Brands have limited control over where their ads appear in programmatic environments, which runs the risk of placements on inappropriate or irrelevant sites. 

Not only does this waste ad spend and impressions, it also jeopardizes brand safety. By appearing next to contextually irrelevant content, brands risk major hits in how consumers perceive their products. Advertising on irrelevant or unsafe ad environments has been an industry-wide issue for years now, and the rise of MFA sites is more reason to take this threat seriously.

3. Brand Reputation and Contextual Relevance

When ads appear in harmful ad environments, they risk damaging a brand’s reputation. Furthermore, they fail to take the mindset of the consumer into account, resulting in an overall ineffective campaign.

Reflecting and maintaining the ethos of your brand through its digital media presence is critical. In fact, Harris Poll showed 67% of consumers would be likely to stop using the brand/product if they viewed the brand’s digital advertising beside false, objectionable or inflammatory content

Maximized brand presence and impression counts via programmatic advertising risk where your brand might actually show up. Let’s see how contextual commerce media can help strike a perfect balance.

 
 

Mitigating Brand Safety Through Contextual Commerce

Behaviorally targeted programmatic media sacrifices customer intent for mass off-site reach. The polar opposite on that spectrum is reaching consumers on-platform on a retailer’s website. 

Finding the balance in both approaches, contextual commerce media leverages contextual targeting to activate relevant content, reaching consumers in the right mindset.

 
 

Chicory works with CPG brands and grocery retailers to drive results through engaging media experience served across an exclusive network of recipe publishers and blogs.

Contextual commerce media works to mend all the risks of harmful content exposure and brand safety that behaviorally targeted programmatic media offers, while still maintaining high impressions, and serving consumers in a far more relevant mindset.

We mentioned above how MFA sites lead to wasted impressions. Eliminating wasted impressions is a key benefit of adopting contextual commerce media. Getting in front of inspired customers puts your ad dollars to work, increasing your media efficiency and allowing you to tap into a network of customers in a relevant purchase mindset.

Contextual commerce media builds and maintains contextual relevance and brand safety. In an ever-changing landscape that’s marred by fraudulent websites, political strife, and harmful content, it’s important now more than ever to advertise in contextually relevant, brand-safe environments.


Want to learn more about how brands and agencies are driving full-funnel impact with Contextual Commerce Media? Read here about Chicory’s innovative ad suite for advertisers.

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