We’re Launching MFA: The Programmatic Advertising Board Game! 🎲🐟
Breaking news from France: GreyFox Ads is diversifying into board games! Our first title? MFA — Money Fiddling & Advertising. Your mission: make as much money as possible at advertisers’ expense. What could possibly go wrong? 🤑
1. What is MFA: Money Fiddling & Advertising?
We had a brilliant idea: enter the booming board-game market while staying close to our programmatic roots. The original post cited a French market figure of €587 million in 2024, up 2.4% (a contextual figure from the original joke, not independently verified here).
And so MFA was born. The rules are simple: compete to build the most profitable advertising operation by using every questionable trick in the book. The winner is the player who extracts the biggest margin. Advertiser outcomes? Oh, those are someone else’s problem. 😈
Of course, in the real industry, MFA commonly refers to Made-for-Advertising websites. We’ve hijacked the initials for a fictional game about the incentives that can damage the quality Open Web.
2. Level 1: Multiply the ad placements
Why settle for a sensible number of ads when you can squeeze another banner into every corner? Our fictional player adds more and more placements until the page resembles a Christmas tree. 🎄
Behind the joke lies a serious issue: excessive ad clutter can damage user experience and dilute the attention available to each advertiser. For more on the phenomenon, see our original analysis of ad-cluttered sites and why MFA websites are a problem for the Open Web.
3. Level 2: Make the creative tiny—but highly viewable!
Here comes the small rendering card: take a standard-sized creative, display it at a tiny size, and keep it stuck to the screen. Suddenly, a visibility report may look impressive even though the ad occupies very little of the user’s screen. 🤏
Viewability and real visual impact are not interchangeable (a visible impression is not necessarily a memorable one). Explore the small-rendering example from our original post, or read our English explanation of screen share and small rendering.
4. Level 3: Rotate and refresh the ads
Need more auction opportunities? Play the Ad Refresh card! In the satirical game, rotating creatives and refreshing placements repeatedly makes inventory seem endless.
In real programmatic advertising, refresh can have legitimate applications when implemented transparently and in line with platform policies. The problem is aggressive or poorly disclosed refresh that prioritises raw impression volume over genuine user attention.
5. Level 4: Collect SSPs and header bidding wrappers
Why send one bid request when you can send many? Add header bidding wrappers, connect more SSP routes, and watch the auction traffic soar! 🔌
The underlying concern is bid duplication: multiple supply paths can represent the same advertising opportunity, increasing infrastructure costs without creating more real impressions. Our source post links to the header bidding discussion; for further context, see the problem with header bidding wrappers and the vicious cycle of bid repeating.
6. Level 5: Win with accidental clicks
In MFA, there is a special bonus for placements that encourage fat-finger clicks or load at exactly the wrong moment. The joke is that the campaign dashboard looks fantastic—even when users never intended to engage. 🙃
Real-world advertisers should look beyond CTR alone. Landing-page engagement, conversion quality, placement-level analysis and invalid-traffic controls can help identify suspicious patterns (although none of those metrics alone proves deliberate manipulation).
7. Level 6: Deploy an army of AI content agents
Why pay for original reporting when you can fill a website with cheaply generated articles? Our fictional game rewards publishing at industrial scale. 🤖
The point is not that AI-assisted writing is inherently low-quality. It is that mass-produced content created mainly to host ads, without meaningful editorial value, can undermine user trust and the economics of genuine journalism. The distinction is useful content versus content manufactured primarily for monetisation.
8. The danger cards: Audits, attention and transparency
Every great board game needs obstacles. In ours, the worst cards are the ones that expose how the money is made:
- Media Trader audit: someone inspects the actual placements rather than just the end-of-campaign dashboard. Read the original audit guide or our English walkthrough.
- Attention measurement: tiny ads and cluttered pages are harder to defend when screen share and meaningful attention are considered.
- Margin transparency: buyers start asking who is being paid and for what. See the original transparency discussion.
- Investigative journalism: a curious journalist at Open Garden, mind Media, Minted or Journal du Net starts asking uncomfortable questions.
These are not accusations against any named publisher, intermediary or journalist. They are satirical “danger cards” based on genuine debates around programmatic quality and accountability.
9. The big reveal: April Fools! 🐟
There is only one way to win at Money Fiddling & Advertising: STOP AT NOTHING! And, naturally, there’s a completely fictional 15% discount with code $GREYFOXADS$. 😂
If you’ve made it this far: APRIL FOOL! We are not launching a board game. But the issues behind the jokes are worth taking seriously.
Here in France, GreyFox Ads believes the quality Open Web deserves a model that rewards real advertising effectiveness—not simply more bid requests, more ads or more opaque fees. Our Master Deals focus on cleaner supply paths, stronger screen share, brand safety, appropriate targeting and transparent costs.
Want to work with a quality programmatic partner?
Let’s make the French Open Web more effective—without playing games with advertisers’ budgets.
Original LinkedIn post: GreyFox Ads’ MFA April Fools’ board game.