Meet the Concept of “Walled Garden as a Service”

Few terms in the advertising industry are more polarizing than “walled garden” – which, in a traditional sense, means any closed platform or closed ecosystem where the technology provider has significant control over the hardware, applications, or content. On one hand, closed environments for data and targeting are often predictable and manageable, which is probably why 80% of digital ad spend goes to environments that could be considered “walled gardens.” On the other hand, to many marketers, “walled garden” has become synonymous with “black box.” It’s not always clear where data comes from, or if advertisers are privy to all the data they could be. 

When most people think of walled gardens, they think of huge tech companies. But really, any data owner can be a walled garden – from retail media networks, to publishers, or data aggregators. All of these entities want to scale the monetization of their owned and operated data and inventory. But historically, they haven’t had a flexible or effective way to do so. 

Enter the concept of “Walled Garden as a Service” (WGaaS), a solution that provides just that – an opportunity for data owners to activate their valuable data and inventory – at a particularly crucial time as the advertising industry undergoes a massive shift.

The Challenge (and Opportunity) for Data Owners

With the deprecation of cookies coming, first-party data is becoming increasingly valuable. In a 2022 survey of marketers, 88% said that first-party data was more important to them than it had been just two years prior. But just 35% said they strongly agreed that they were ready for the cookieless future. And sure enough, while data owners now have a huge opportunity to create new revenue streams, scaling and monetizing upon that data, especially off-site of their owned and operated inventory, can be a daunting task for a few reasons:

• In order to stay future-proofed, their data will need to be stitched together with a cookieless identity solution.
• Activating their data off-site has historically been all through managed service, making it difficult to scale.
• A crowded market makes it difficult to differentiate their technology and create successful streams of revenue.
• They face the threat of losing control over their data protection and compliance by giving third-parties access to their data.

Data owners are looking for ways to make their data seamlessly accessible and activated for advertisers in a way that is differentiated… and also within an environment that they can comfortably control.

MediaMath Is Changing the Game

Nearly 70% of advertisers think that their walled garden spending will increase in order to contend with new regulations and norms around data privacy. If you’re a data owner, why not capitalize on this? MediaMath’s Walled Garden as a Service is an off-the-shelf, white-labeled platform with a future-proofed solution to differentiate a data owner’s technology and scale data and inventory monetization.  

By taking the heavy lifting off the shoulders of data owners, and doing so within a completely controlled environment, MediaMath is creating an easy and seamless path to new revenue streams.

• On-Site: Scale your on-site inventory within MediaMath’s Curated Marketplaces – turnkey private marketplaces of inventory with proven performance in a specific vertical or towards a specific KPI.
• Off-Site: Scale your first-party audiences offsite within MediaMath’s Curated Marketplaces and also within MediaMath’s Audience Taxonomy, so that advertisers can target your audiences across the large-scale publisher network.

Fully prepared for the cookieless future, MediaMath has also taken the lead with a truly agnostic approach, making this a future-proofed solution that ensures scale in all regions, with or without cookies.

As an extra bonus, by white-labeling MediaMath and making the technology their own, data owners can differentiate themselves in the market – especially now that MediaMath has access to enhanced combined capabilities of Infillion’s other products following its recent acquisition. Data owners can offer unique capabilities to advertisers now, including: 

• Award-winning high-impact, cross-device creative 
• First-party proprietary location data for hyper-local targeting and personalization
• Zero-party 100% opted-in survey data  
• MediaMath proprietary performance-based audiences
• Customizable algorithmic decisioning for improved optimization

“Walled garden” no longer has to refer exclusively to the opaque environments put forward by a few large tech companies. Indeed, the ability to create one and scale it is an incredibly promising opportunity for data owners. With three-quarters of advertisers who spend on walled gardens saying they have fluidity in their budgets to explore new opportunities and platforms, the time is ripe – and MediaMath’s offering can get data owners ready to capitalize on it. 

We’re here to help! Reach out to us for any questions you may have about “Walled Garden as a Service.”