What is a Walled Garden?
A Walled Garden (“walled garden” in French) is a closed ecosystem in which all operations are controlled by the operator of this ecosystem.
While the concept was not born with the Internet, but in the telecommunications industry as early as the 1970s, The Walled Gardens are now very associated with the GAFA.
Apple controls the entire iOS ecosystem (applications, devices, payments, payments, payments, data, data, advertising, video, music, browser...); META, Amazon and Google also have power over the entire value chain, from data collection to shared performance.
You will have understood it: A Walled Garden is obtained when advertisers are forced to use the entire marketing stack owned by an actor with a closed ecosystem :
- The ad server
- the DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization)
- The CDP (Customer Data Platform)
Their strength is (among other things) to provide all the functionalities necessary for the management of advertising campaigns and targeting... but without allowing advertisers to export data, excluding performance metrics.
What does that mean in a world that is trending towards cookieless, or at least first-party cookies?
That the Walled Gardens will gain even more power. It is in fact to get out of dependence on the massive platforms that are the GAFA that several collective initiatives are taking shape around the world to create their own walled gardens.
“The state of the open internet”: Google killed the web.
Walled Gardens +25%
Open Internet -28%
traditional media -20-30%https://t.co/uQDOz3pLD0 By @jouncemedia pic.twitter.com/cauvqgjxgx
— Thomasbcn (@Thomasbcn) March 19, 2021
The Common login on a network of sites is one of the preferred approaches, because creating your own ecosystem requires a very significant amount of strength.
The e-commerce “case”: rethinking the message and extending your cookie consent strategy to the user login
E-commerce sites have the particularity of systematically obtaining contact information from their customers. Otherwise it is difficult to send them the products ordered!
However, this does not solve the fundamental problem of traffic managers or acquisition managers: obtaining additional consent to use this data for marketing purposes.
In a world that is increasingly oriented towards “privacy” by default, the dimension of trust and the creativity of advertisers and marketing specialists must increasingly increase in power:
- Be very clear about the exchange of value (i.e. underline the customer's interest in agreeing, not only for the brand)
- Maximize the volume of data received by fully exploiting the possibility of its analysis
- Move from a “vendor-centric” approach to a reciprocal exchange, which should lead to an evolution of the messages presented. “This is how we benefit from this exchange, and here is how you benefit from it as well”... enough to radically change your tone after years of “pushing” cookies (”Do you agree or not?”) which is rarely based on the feeling that the Internet user has something to do with it.
So the watchword: clarity.
But this should not only be done as part of your cookie policy!
Your obsession in the future will be toincrease the number of users authenticated/logged into your ecosystem or site.
What does that go through? A multitude of elements that you may have already implemented, or even experienced yourself as a consumer:
- member prices
- Outlet or private sales available against login
- exclusive offers
- gamification for members only...
In fact, we published an article on these topics (How to increase the consent rate and member logins on your e-commerce site).
In addition, with adapted solutions such as CRM And the CDP, the capture of data on Authenticated Internet users will help you connect the dots between multiple platforms for interacting with customers, including between a network of stores”Brick and Mortar” and the e-commerce site, helping to obtain a unique view of the customer... while respecting their consent.
Good segmentation of this audience increases your ability to reach new audiences in a targeted manner, through the use of mechanisms such as similar audiences in social networks and search engines, or anonymous user cohorts on the web via programmatic display.
Were you already familiar with this concept? What do you think of Walled Gardens' sectoral initiatives to create so as not to rely solely on meta/Facebook data, etc. for targeted campaigns?
