What Are Walled Gardens in CTV Advertising?
In this clip from Streaming Media Connect 2024, Future Today Marketplace VP Tim Ware goes ’round the horn with Roku’s Charlie Goodman, Streaming Made Easy’s Marion Ranchet, TVREV’s Alan Wolk, and IAB Tech Lab’s Anthony Katsur on the definition of walled gardens in the CTV advertising marketplace.
Ware asks everybody in the session to define what they consider a “walled garden.”
Wolk says, “A walled garden is just a service of any sort that, whether it's a web company or a TV company, doesn't share its data willingly with other people.”
Goodman says, “A walled garden, at least from a core ad tech perspective, is where the whole thing, from planning, forecasting, activation, delivery, and measurement all happens within the confines of that space. I think for a walled garden, you have to have all those capabilities and be compelling enough that somebody wants to do so in such a way that it's isolated to that platform. But it's not interoperable to the rest of the media buying that an agency or brand is running.”
Katsur breaks walled gardens down into three categories: having audience and content at scale, unique data insights, and proprietary technology that creates a barrier around the platform. “The key is scale,” he says. “You can have unique content or a unique audience [and] insight, but if you only reach 500,000 individuals, you're not necessarily a must-buy for a media plan. So you have to have that at scale. And then you have proprietary technology by which buyers can access your garden. That is the [garden] wall.”
Ranchet notes that some companies exemplify this approach by creating environments that maximize user engagement and ad revenue while controlling access. “If I'm looking at Roku, for example," she says, "[they bring] amazing content onto the platform, making sure people spend as much time there as possible, [and knowing] enough about what's [happening on] that platform so they can bring on ads and make sure people spend more and more time, [which means] more money, etc. The question is how friendly those gardens play with their partners and with competition. That's a different story, and there's definitely differences in the US and Europe.”
Join us in November 2024 for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media Connect.
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