The phrase “walled gardens” is a staple of almost every industry study and research in the ad tech sector.
WalledGardens meaning is “isolated online ecosystems” where user data is hard to obtain, presenting a constant challenge for digital marketers. It is more crucial than ever for marketers to assess the potential and difficulties that surround walled gardens now and to consider the influence that walled gardens have on the marketing sector as we approach 2024.
What is a walled garden?
walled garden is an online environment that is completely under the authority of one digital business. Because big digital businesses with walled gardens typically closely control access to the user data, content, and advertising that occurs within the ecosystems, the Digital advertising landscape on these ecosystems is pretty restricted.
A few instances of walled garden ecosystems are those seen in Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. These walled gardens offer unique benefits, such as targeted targeting inside specific ecosystems and access to large user bases. Additionally, reaching these consumers outside of the ecosystems might be challenging, which limits your ability to customize your advertising tactics.
Integrated marketing has never been more crucial.
Walled gardens can be very helpful for publishers, despite their seeming menacing and oppressive appearance. After all, you can satisfy all of your publishing requirements by traveling to one location. Publishers may increase their audience reach, monetization choices, and referral traffic by utilizing walled gardens.
Connecting with customers via a variety of touchpoints has become increasingly important in today’s world. This includes connected TVs (CTVs), websites, smartphone apps, and in-store buying. However, as integrated marketing becomes more useful, the number of platforms with walled garden ecosystems has expanded, which makes it more challenging in many cases to implement a truly integrated and personalized marketing plan. Because of this, a lot of marketers now see the benefits of a more focused approach to marketing and stress the significance of completely integrated advertising tactics.
Walled garden ecosystems provide certain marketing benefits, particularly with regard to audience size. However, they also present certain problems, such as the need for you to be creative and innovative in your approach to engaging your audience across many platforms.
Walled garden perspectives from the 2023 Cannes Lions
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity of 2023 has a lot to say about the importance of walled gardens in the marketing world, providing a dramatic glimpse of industry trends and concepts. Let’s examine two important lessons learned from the festival this year.
Media outlets in retail
Dubbed “retail media,” a number of retail organizations have begun to sell advertising space within their own walled garden shopping platforms in recent years. Amazon and Walmart are two examples of platforms that have created unique advertising ecosystems in which they sell advertisements to marketers directly within the shopping environment.
Getting around the walled gardens of retail media’s sell-side
Retail media presents special opportunity for marketers, but there are drawbacks as well. One reason is that there is a limited amount of ad space in these environments, which makes sell-side competition tough and drives up ad rates. This change in dynamics also makes marketers reevaluate the order in which they prioritize their marketing channels, concentrating more on the outcomes of their work than on specific channels within the platforms.
Possibilities in the walled gardens of retail media’s buy-side
Advertisers on the buy-side derive different advantages from walled gardens advertising and retail media channels. The users in these ecosystems are probably high-intent shoppers—individuals who are further down the sales funnel and about to make a purchase—because they are exploring in an online purchasing environment. In these settings, shoppers can also be more specifically targeted because marketers can reach highly particular audience segments based on information such as purchasing habits, preferences, and even past purchases.
Multichannel advertising
The need of omnichannel marketing was emphasized by speakers at the 2023 Cannes Lions Festival as a way to more successfully engage people even in the midst of a plethora of walled garden ecosystems. In order to provide a consistent brand experience across all channels, marketers should prioritize methods that connect with customers through a variety of touchpoints. This enables advertisers to concentrate more on outcomes rather than walled garden platforms or other particular advertising channels.
Walled gardens are not going anywhere anytime soon.
Although walled gardens in advertising come with a number of difficulties, they are here to stay. What condition are these settings in the industry at the moment?
In tech, attempts are being made to demolish walled gardens.
Regulatory measures have been proposed in a few nations to combat the dominance of numerous large tech businesses in their individual marketplaces. The Canadian entanglements between Meta and Google are a prime example of this. In the Canadian market, neither company is currently able to display news on their websites. Since the tech companies used to earn more views and so more ad money, the decision was made to give Canadian news organizations more control over their advertising revenue. Even if it’s not much, this does point to a change in dynamics.
Why businesses are not complying
Walled gardens remained in 2023 despite their difficulties, primarily because the tech corporations who own them are very good at making money off of them. These closed ecosystems accounted for 78% of worldwide digital advertising income in 2022, and estimates indicate that percentage will increase to 83% by 2027. Giving up control over one’s surroundings is seen as a loss of enormous revenue streams by businesses operating in walled gardens, hence relinquishing control over a walled garden ecosystem is an undesirable proposition.
What is ahead for walled gardens
What can you and other digital marketers anticipate from walled garden ecosystems in the near future as time goes on?
1. A world without cookies:
The shift to a future without cookies is a major factor to take into account. Third-party cookie usage is being gradually phased out by several popular browsers. Many people are searching for suitable substitutes that enable behavior tracking and more customized advertising experiences in the wake of this ruling. Marketing techniques can be adjusted to the current environment with the use of solutions like Experian’s identity resolution, which can offer a strong alternative.
2. An increase in small gardens:
In the future, you should also expect to see a proliferation of smaller, more focused walled garden ecosystems. These so-called “mini gardens” have their own benefits and challenges because they cater to more specialized audiences and sectors.
3. Other IDs:
Many options have emerged as you look for new identifying techniques outside of cookies; they need more investigation and testing. Among them are privacy-compliant technologies, such as Unified ID 2.0, that let you offer more customized adverts to customers without sacrificing their privacy.
Getting around the changing walled garden scene in 2024
You will still encounter possibilities and difficulties with walled gardens as 2024 gets underway. As we head toward a world without cookies, the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity underscored once again how critical it is for marketers to prioritize omnichannel marketing within walled garden environments and familiarize themselves with identity resolution solutions. You must learn to live with the fact that walled gardens are here to stay and use creativity to traverse a changing and changing landscape in order to do all of this.
Conclusion:
An advertising walled garden meaning is that it’s a closed ecosystem in which a certain ad technology platform or network controls the flow of information and campaign performance data within its own closed platform. This type of ecosystem is commonly used in the advertising industry.
