Walled Garden VS Open Web: What's Changing in Digital Advertising

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125tomaa
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Walled Garden VS Open Web: What's Changing in Digital Advertising

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For more than a decade, walled gardens have been a given for brands and advertisers : a large number of users willing to spend a good part of their online time there, high levels of personalization of the content offering and targeting of their audience , thanks to an in-depth knowledge of data, personal information and interests.
All this translated into the possibility of creating effective and high-performance advertising campaigns , so much so that on average the most significant budgets were invested on these channels, even for campaigns with conversion objectives.

But, in the last few years, the list of albania consumer email situation has changed. Walled gardens are progressively losing appeal in the face of an open web that is instead gaining ground, proving to be more reactive to the evolution of privacy regulations , technological progress and user expectations.

But let's proceed in order and before we get to understand the change underway, let's start from the basics.

Walled Gardens: What are they?
The term “walled gardens” refers to closed ecosystems in which data, content and user interactions are confined within the platforms themselves.

Meta, Amazon, Google, TikTok: it is enough to refer to some big players attributable to this category to understand the characteristics of these systems.
Here the proprietary companies choose which information, services or products to show to users and all interactions take place within a controlled environment.
All this, as we anticipated, allows for a very precise and centralized collection of data : every click, viewing of a product, interaction with a content or an advertisement is tracked, providing a rich source of information on user behavior .

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walled garden marketing
Thanks to all the data collected, it is possible to create detailed user profiles to be used for profiled target audiences to reach with targeted advertisements, thus increasing the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.
It is therefore no coincidence that, as reported by eMarketer, Meta and Google were the destination, in 2023, of over 60% of global advertising spending. Advanced
profiling through first-party data , but not only: let's start with a significant fact to also introduce some less positive aspects that concern walled gardens.

According to Statista, in 2014 walled gardens occupied 62% of the time spent online by the adult public in the US, a percentage that dropped to 39% in 2023.
This data is significant of a progressive disinterest of the public in the use and enjoyment of the same walled gardens . The reason is certainly attributable not only to a progressive loss of interest in the proposed contents, but also to the growing interest of users towards their own privacy .

One of the less transparent aspects of walled gardens is the management of data itself. Users have little control over proprietary data and how it is used: the process by which each company manages data
is, in fact, considered proprietary. Furthermore, most platforms only allow advertisers to see aggregate metrics, which leads to issues of transparency of the performance itself.

Open Web: The Ever More “Real” Alternative to Walled Gardens
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