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The concept of the “hedged garden” is gaining traction in the AdTech space as a promising new approach. It offers a more controlled and protected environment for advertisers, reshaping how digital advertising operates. But what exactly is a hedged garden, and could it be the solution we’ve been looking for? Let’s dive into the details and explore its implications.
Walled gardens vs. the open web
Walled gardens continue to disrupt the advertising industry to stay relevant. Google, Meta (Facebook), and Amazon, the largest walled gardens, offer consumer privacy and rich first-party data to advertisers. But, time spent within these platforms, Google and Meta specifically, continues to decrease.
Open web: Pros and cons
On the other hand, the open web allows for more transparency, scale, and constant diversification. Yet, this has not led to increased spending. As a result, the open web continues to lag behind walled gardens. With a heavy reliance on third-party data and growing concerns over signal loss, the open web faces significant challenges. Under these circumstances, advertisers turn to easy activation channels like walled gardens, even as they become less effective to marketers.
Consumers are increasingly focused on privacy, pushing the industry toward alternatives to third-party cookies. As Google rethinks its cookie deprecation plans, channels like connected TV (CTV) and mobile apps, which don’t rely on cookies, are gaining traction.
“A significant portion of web traffic does not support cookies today — and that number will grow as Google rolls out [its] new solution. This means that the industry shouldn’t slow down investments in cookieless solutions, including alternative IDs, first-party data and data-driven contextual targeting.”
kimberly gilberti, general manager, experian
This shift emphasizes first-party data and user choice as a potential solution that balances privacy with effective advertising sources.
Enter the hedged garden
So, what is a hedged garden? The “hedged garden” is a new industry concept where a network of publishers works together to activate first-party data sets in a privacy-compliant way across many partners at scale. These publishers run their businesses with large amounts of first-party consumer data. But they are not big enough on their own.
What does a hedged garden look like? Hedges are more permeable and not as tall as walls. This idea is key to the success of the hedged garden.
Data protection and privacy regulations
As hedged gardens grow, staying compliant with privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is vital. These rules focus on protecting user data by requiring clear consent and transparency. Hedged gardens help publishers share first-party data in a safe, privacy-compliant way.
By working together, they ensure data is used responsibly, aligning with strict privacy regulations. This not only keeps marketers compliant but also builds trust with consumers at a time when data protection is more important than ever.
Opportunities for marketers in hedged gardens
Hedged gardens offer unique opportunities for marketers to enhance their strategies. Unlike walled gardens, hedged gardens offer the ability to work with a wider array of data sources and provide more diverse insights into audience behavior. This flexibility lets marketers develop more tailored, cross-platform campaigns that reach users in different ways.
Additionally, hedge gardens encourage collaboration with multiple partners, allowing for new partnerships and innovative strategies. With data from several sources, marketers can create more precise and privacy-compliant targeting methods to deliver better results. With the right approach, hedged gardens give marketers the freedom to break away from restrictive ecosystems and drive creative and impactful growth.
How Experian navigates through hedged gardens
As our ecosystem moves toward a hedged garden solution, how do we get involved? We are already a key ingredient for this type of solution within the TV landscape. Below, we walk through how we partner with one of our current TV media clients.
Organize our client’s data and provide a Living Unit ID (LUID)
First, we work with our client to clean and enhance their data, matching individual personal identifiable information (PII), such as an email address, to a household through a LUID. Our Digital Graph, which includes hashed emails (HEMs), cookies, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), IPs, universal IDs, and CTV IDs, is rebuilt weekly to create accurate, refreshed connections. This consistent linkage creates precise targeting and measurement over time.
Our interconnected Offline and Digital Graphs organize identity into households and devices, enriched with marketing data for deeper insights and better addressability. With partnerships across major platforms, we improve match rates, helping you activate audiences seamlessly for optimal reach and measurement.
Enrich data through Experian Marketing Data
Next, our TV media client licenses our Marketing Attributes. This data is the most comprehensive resource for both traditional and digital marketing campaigns. With its multi-channel availability and addressable capabilities, our Marketing Attributes allow our clients to develop insights and build audiences based on a wide range of attributes within their segment set, ensuring they reach relevant audiences across all channels.
Activate audiences across the ecosystem
Finally, we help our client execute their audiences across the full digital and TV ecosystem. We enable the connection that allows these audiences to be activated by matching partner LUIDs (example: LUID123 = LUIDABC). By using client-specific LUIDs to match up data in a privacy-first manner, we can continue to build strong partnerships within the fast-growing ecosystem.
Are hedged gardens the future of advertising?
Have we found the perfect bridge between walled gardens and the open web? We’re hedging our bets. Our vote is yes, but only time will tell.
The future of advertising is shifting, and hedged gardens appear to be a promising model that balances the scale of walled gardens with the flexibility of the open web. We’re using what we learned from the TV industry to support other hedged garden verticals (retail media networks, audio, and gaming).
Now that we know what a hedged garden is, we should consider what the future holds for both walled and hedged gardens.
What’s next for walled gardens
- Increased privacy regulations: Walled gardens will face stricter regulations on data use, pushing them to adapt for compliance and trust.
- Reduced market dominance: As advertisers want more control, reliance on walled gardens could decline, shifting focus to hedged gardens.
- Diversified ad spend: Brands may spread their budgets across multiple platforms instead of being locked into walled gardens.
The future of hedged gardens
- Greater industry collaboration: Expect more publishers and platforms to join forces in hedged gardens for better data activation.
- Expansion into new channels: Hedged gardens will expand into emerging channels like gaming and connected devices.
- Improved data integration: Privacy-first data sharing in hedged gardens will lead to smoother, more secure ad targeting.
Data collaboration in a post-cookie world
As signal loss becomes a growing concern, the need for secure, privacy-first data collaboration will rise. Hedged gardens offer a pathway forward, allowing advertisers to activate first-party data across multiple partners while complying with data regulations.
This is where Experian Collaboration shines. By enabling data sharing without exposing raw consumer data, clients and partners can collaborate at Experian in their own environment or in clean rooms. Each of these environments allows partners to exchange data and gain insights without compromising privacy.
Maximize your advertising reach with Experian
As the advertising landscape changes, one thing remains clear: successful campaigns will require flexible, privacy-first solutions. At Experian, we are at the forefront of this shift. With our data expertise and advanced collaboration solutions, we’re here to help you navigate through both walled and hedged gardens to maximize your advertising reach.
Together, we can navigate across the walled and hedged garden ecosystems. Contact us to learn how.
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by AdExchanger // Friday, March 15th, 2019 – 12:06 am “Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today's column is written by Preethy Vaidyanathan, chief product officer at Tapad, a part of Experian For years marketers asked, “How do we get more data?” Now that they've mastered data mining, marketers want to know what’s next. The time has come for organizations to make their abundance of digital data actionable, increase ROI and reach consumers with consistent, personalized experiences across all touchpoints. A seamless consumer experience can only be achieved by consolidating digital data. Organizations, however, are finding that consolidating data silos is more time-consuming and complicated than initially expected. The challenges One of the most pervasive obstacles companies face in when consolidating data is adopting inefficient and costly tactics that quickly become outdated. For instance, over the last couple of years, many companies turned to enterprise data warehouses to consolidate data silos, but some were too expensive or poorly suited for raw, unstructured and semi-structured data. This led companies to adopt data management initiatives, which bogged down many enterprises. Perception among senior level executives is another challenge. Many still question the need for digital transformation – achieving greater efficiencies through updating business and organizational processes with new technologies. Gartner found that more than half (54%) of senior executives say their digital business objective is transformational, while 46% say their objective is optimization. Digital transformation and data consolidation require time and effort. So, many large organizations work to overcome data silos as part of a multiyear digital transformation versus an immediate action item, delaying the benefits the company sees from taking on this project. All of these challenges make delaying progress in data consolidation easy, but companies should remember the impetus for doing so: creating a seamless customer experience that, in turn, drives business results. Brands with higher quality customer experience grow revenue faster than direct competitors with lower quality customer experience. The approach Many brands go into the digital transformation process assuming they have massive amounts of customer data, and that much of it is valuable or will be in the future. They might spend months aggregating that data in data stores or data lakes – at great expense. The trouble is that their data was scattered across multiple databases, which means it’s highly fragmented. As a result of this fragmentation, marketers can’t activate their data in ways that enhance the customer experience. To do so, companies must ensure their digital data is highly flexible so it can provide a holistic view of the consumer journey across every digital, in-store, in-venue and offline channel. I’d recommend that organizations taking on data centralization initiatives prioritize use cases that offer the company the greatest benefit. This is where organizations should establish a “crawl, walk, run” approach to data centralization to ensure key executives buy into the process. Starting with a subset of use cases, such as customer retention or upsell, or with a campaign, which is an even smaller starting point, allows executives to see the benefits of data consolidation projects relatively quickly. Once they validate these initial benefits, they can expand the range of use cases or campaigns, as well as the marketing ROI for their business. While data centralization is a long-term project that may take several years to complete, it doesn’t mean a business can’t get started now and see measurable results quickly. Break down data consolidation into stages so the organization can experience wins along the way. At the end of the day, data consolidation will help organizations deliver more effective marketing campaigns that drive business growth. Follow Experian Marketing Services (@ExperianMktg_US) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter. Contact us today!
Tapad's technology enhances Bidtellect clients frequency capping and audience extension capabilities cross device. NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian, is a global marketing technology company and leader in digital identity resolution solutions, today announced a new partnership with Bidtellect, a leading native Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Bidtellect's paid content distribution platform will leverage The Tapad Graph™ as its first cross-device partner. The integration will offer Bidtellect's clients in the U.S. and Canada cross-device frequency capping and enhanced audience extension capabilities. The combination of Tapad's leading cross-device technology, with Bidtellect's unparalleled scale and optimization capabilities, will allow content marketers within brands and agencies to develop even more strategic, effective content marketing campaigns. The Tapad Graph™ will allow content marketers to gain greater reach and create more relevant, unified messaging with targeted delivery, when used in conjunction with Bidtellect's technology. Marketers can expect to benefit from amplified reach, and enhanced, privacy-safe engagement with desired audiences as a result of this partnership. "Partnering with Tapad, the leaders in cross-device data, provides Bidtellect with a complete solution that leverages both probabilistic and deterministic mapping strategies," said Mike Conway, Chief Technology Officer at Bidtellect. "The Tapad relationship expands our audience size by providing the opportunity to reach the same user across multiple devices and, when used in conjunction with our frequency capping functionality, ensures increased reach, reduced ad saturation, and elimination of wasted ad spend." As the partnership progresses, Tapad will also work with Bidtellect to provide advanced attribution for conversions and engagement metrics including connectivity and amplification. These advanced insights will help brands and agencies develop a more holistic approach to content marketing, so they can build audiences and influence bidding algorithms that directly impact their business. "We're thrilled to be working with Bidtellect as the company's first cross-device partner," said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "At Tapad, we are continuously advancing our identity resolution solutions to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of marketers. As a part of that commitment, we look to work with partners where our technology is able to enhance their offering to better serve marketers. We are looking forward to creating that superior experience with the Bidtellect team." Contact us today to get started
What is the most valued asset an advertiser has? Is it their brand? Is it their inventory? Is it their ever-improving website? The answer is simple – it’s their CRM file. Without it, nothing else matters. People have several options when it comes to the wide variety of products and services in the marketplace, so advertisers need to communicate with their customers in a relevant manner through media channels their customers prefer. This creates a more pleasant experience for the customer, and the potential for a lifelong relationship. And the CRM file is the first part of that equation. The second part of the equation is quality, third-party information. When combined, advertisers can have a holistic view into the customer’s behaviors, preferences and interests – keys to relevant communication. And of course, Experian is here to help! OmniActivation is built upon Experian’s ability to leverage/match an advertiser’s own customer file including the names and addresses, email, phone numbers, social IDs, digital IDs, etc., with various media partners and destinations. As you can imagine, there is complexity in how each of these identifying points can be used for successful matching/targeting. For this article, we want to focus on the value of being able to match using the client’s names/addresses. Our clients have a common goal to ensure that they are sending the right messages/right offers at the right time to their customers to drive business and revenue. Matching (using name and address) is the ultimate means of being able to accomplish that goal. Experian has perfected the ability to match using names/addresses and has provided this support for decades to benefit our clients. Our matching expertise relies on the following three critical factors: Security: Experian ensures the security of any data by using encryption or secure transfer protocols in receiving data for matching projects. We understand the value of personally identifiable information (PII) and our high security standards reflect that focus. Accuracy: Our ability to match PII using custom logic and parameters ensures that we are identifying the most accurate matches. Matching PII between two files is the most direct and accurate way to target. We can identify PII matches based upon individual, household and address levels and have consistently outperformed our competitors on name/address matching standards. Confidence: Experian is a trusted third party for our clients and their most valued asset, their CRM files. While we know that the complexity of matching will continue to expand including all types of current and new digital applications, Experian is confident that the value of PII matching will continue to be a cornerstone for our clients to reach their customers.