GroupM to Strengthen Site Vetting Against Made For Advertising Sites

As featured in Digiday, read the full article here.

Ruben Schreurs spoke to Digiday on GroupM’s recent decision to partner with Jounce Media in removing made for advertising sites from their inclusion lists.

GroupM has established a collaboration with Jounce Media to implement a global initiative to prevent the distribution of made-for-advertising inventory within all their agencies. Starting from 2020, Ebiquity and Jounce have upheld a strategic partnership consistently highlighting the ineffectiveness of MFAs through a range of industry reports and for multiple clients as an integral aspect of their Digital Governance solution. GroupM’s recent proactive measure to address the issue of wasted resources in MFA represents a significant advancement. This effort is projected to safeguard billions of advertiser dollars annually, specifically within the US. Furthermore, its influence is anticipated to expand as other agency networks naturally adopt a similar approach.

As there isn’t currently an industry definition for MFAs, GroupM will be the first media agency to take this step in setting protections against them setting a precedent within the advertising industry on metrics that play into.

“The integration of Jounce’s technology into one of the ad industry’s largest programmatic buying systems was a significant development and one that others are likely to follow. This will be a big blow [to MFA websites] if they roll this out the right way. The days of using inflated vanity metrics are numbered”
Ruben Schreurs, Chief Strategy Officer, Ebiquity

Made for advertising sites are causing major issues in the programmatic space, with 15.3% of the $375m+ ad spend analysed in our ‘Hidden Cost of Digital Advertising’ report found to have been wasted on MFAs. Made for Advertising websites are high contributors to carbon emissions while providing no value to brands.