Online advertising is a cesspit

A highly recommended article in The Wall Street Journal, “‘Made for Advertising websites’ are the marketing industry’s latest messy situation”, illustrates the disastrous state of online advertising, with millions of pages of MFA, Made For Advertising: junk pages with clickbait headlines filled with unprecedented amounts of ads, often serving the same ad incessantly to the same user or using intrusive formats.

Hardly a new phenomenon: these sites accounted for around 5% of ads in programmatic advertising auctions at the beginning of 2020 and are now at more than 30%. A disappointment for advertisers who must know that they are being duped, but don’t seem to care. In the WSJ article, one executive says: “if I need to increase my brand awareness, it’s okay if some of my ads appear on those sites, because at least people saw my damn logo.” Doh! they saw your logo, so what? Would you buy anything from a company that throws away its money (and then passes the cost on to the user) on these kinds of pages?

We’ve gone from “half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don’t know which half…” to “I’m throwing all my adversing budget in the trash and annoying users who now hate my brand, but I don’t care.” If the vast majority of marketeers today had their online advertising audited in front of their CEOs, many would be fired as incompetent for wasting their company’s…