But what do we mean by walled gardens? How can brands build their own walled garden? Let’s take a closer look.
What is a walled garden in digital marketing?
The first thing to be clear about is the concept. When we talk about a walled garden, we are referring to platforms that manage their users’ data in a closed technological ecosystem without the intervention of external agents. In other words, these platforms operate with First Party Data. This means that they work with data that users have provided in exchange for using their services or devices.
I’m sure you are already thinking about who might be behind these giant walled gardens. And yes, you are right. Of course, of course, our friends Amazon, Google, Facebook and even Apple. They all operate as closed big data platforms that dominate the digital advertising landscape.
If we add to this the fact that new regulations at European level to safeguard user privacy, as well as operating system updates (e.g. Apple with iOS 14) are making it more difficult to collect and exploit third-party data, the result is a perfect scenario for the promotion of these walled gardens. Thus, companies can operate with their own data and not depend on third parties to accumulate and give it away for a price. Therefore, these platforms have become a key strategy to prepare and anticipate the changing environment in the sector.
The relationship between walled gardens and Third-Party Cookies
First of all, and in order to understand what is really happening with cookies, we need to put ourselves in the picture and explain what Third-Party Cookies are. Broadly speaking, we can say that they are data that record a user’s browsing history. Let’s imagine that we are browsing the Internet and we visit a website that sells mobile devices. The first thing that appears when you enter this website is a pop-up window that asks for your authorisation to accept the collection of cookies. From this point on, everything we do on the site will leave a footprint that translates into information about our behaviour and that will be used by marketing partners to convince you to buy those devices.
Therefore, the exploitation of this data has a direct application in many areas of marketing. For example, when we use this data to conduct remarketing campaigns to users who have visited a particular product in our ecommerce or when we want to personalise a user’s experience when they enter our site. For marketers, this information is very valuable, and its high potential lies in the fact that thanks to these cookies we can understand the buying habits of users, optimise campaigns and, in addition, they have the advantage of being very easy to access data.
Now, perhaps, we understand better the great commotion and nervousness that was generated in 2022 when Google announced that Third-Party Cookies would gradually disappear. It is worth noting that this has been postponed on two previous occasions, and we have recently learned of Google’s final decision not to carry it out. This announcement to abandon plans to remove third-party cookies is due to enormous pressure from advertisers, governments and regulations such as the European Union’s DMA. In addition, it faced numerous technical and implementation challenges in its Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aimed to protect user privacy while maintaining the effectiveness of digital advertising.
With this changing environment and knowing the uncertain reality surrounding Third-Party Cookies, our hope lies in First-Party Cookies, which we know with certainty will always continue to provide us with more complete and detailed user data.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of walled gardens for brands?
The main advantage is that you get an audience base with great breadth, depth and scalability. They are precise segmentations that contain great detail and are generated in real time. This, in turn, allows us to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message. If we analyse the case of Facebook and Google, which lead the global online advertising spending, we can clearly see how their potential is to offer brands to impact a wide audience with their ads, which can be segmented by gender, age, behaviour or purchase intentions…
On the downside, we find that the use and exploitation of these audiences is only applicable to their own platform and we cannot export them to others. This characteristic does not allow us to have an integrated vision of our strategy as a whole. However, there are options to bring this data to open environments such as a DMP (Data Management Platform) to collect, extend and centralise data from different sources.
The challenge of creating a walled garden
To build a robust walled garden from the outset we need to provide really interesting reasons for users to agree to share their data. Community is key, as is quality content distribution.
We must also get rid of silos, breaking down the internal barriers that make data exploitation ineffective. Our walled garden must contain all the brand’s online and offline assets, with full integration between our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and the advertising platforms we are using.
