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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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As many folks within the email eco-system probably know by now, Spamhaus, an organization known for compiling several widely used anti-spam lists, has been extremely active this week. Over the past week, Spamhaus has listed a number of potentially hazardous IP addresses used by some of the world’s largest email service providers due to the way their newsletters signups are set up. According to most of the listings, Spamhaus has stated: Unfortunately, the said newsletter service is not verifying the email address of new subscribers. Due to this, the service can be easily abused to "listbomb" internet users. Problem resolution ============================ The newsletter service needs to clean up their email address list and ensure that bulk emails are only being sent to recipients who have verifiably subscribed to their bulk email service. In addition, the newsletter service should take appropriate actions to prevent further abuse of their service: a) Implementing CAPTCHA to prevent automated subscriptions b) Implementing Confirmed Opt In (COI) to prevent abusers from adding random email addresses to the newsletter service that are not owned by the subscriber For the most part these listings should not directly impact marketers’ current ability to send their campaigns and reach their customers as they are listed as “warnings” within the Spamhaus system. What is important to understand is that these types of listings will likely continue to happen as Spamhaus has seen a dramatic increase in malicious use of newsletter sign-ups to "email bomb" various addresses, especially government (.gov) domains. While we understand that implementing CAPTCHA, or COI into any marketing system is not something that can be done quickly, Experian Marketing Services has recommended that our clients begin to investigate how they can potentially implement this process into their newsletter sign-ups. By asking customers to simply perform the CAPTCHA check, it will not only protect marketers from adding addresses from automated signup systems, but will also reduce the possibility of being listed with Spamhaus for these types of issues in the future. Some additional resources: Massive Email Bombs Target .Gov Addresses Subscription bombing, ESPs and Spamhaus, August 15, 2016 by laura in Best Practices Comment on the latter blog post on WordtotheWise.com from the CEO of Spamhaus: Excellent well summarized article Laura. No, we’ve not changed SBL policy to require COI. It’s something we very strongly advise but we cannot make a requirement. We’ll have to consider it if list-bombing of this magnitude cannot be kept in check by list managers. This incident involved a large number of government addresses belonging to various countries being subscribed to very large numbers of lists in a very short space of time by scripts run by the attacker(s). Most of the lists hit by the attack used COI and therefore only sent confirmation requests and did not subscribe any addresses. The attack undoubtedly also hit lists which used Captcha in addition to COI and thus did not even proceed to COI (those list admins deserve some sort of community ‘hi 5’ award, since one can imagine how hard it is to convince one’s management to implement COI let alone put Captcha in front of it). The issue is the badly-run ‘open’ lists which happily subscribed every address without any consent verification and which now continue as participants in the list-bombing of government addresses. These we are trying to address with SBL listings to prompt resolution by the Senders. As you noticed, most of these particular incident listings are for IPs ending “.0/32” which does not cause any mail issue to the Sender and is deliberately used where we have a good relationship with the Sender and know they will act quickly on the alert. Steve Linford Chief Executive The Spamhaus Project
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As partnership deals mount, aggressive hiring underway for unified cross-screen technology leaders NEW YORK, July 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, the leader in cross-device marketing technology and now a part of Experian, has announced plans for aggressive expansion in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. This move capitalizes on Tapad's exceptional performance for brands and marketing technology companies in North America and Europe. With it's proprietary Tapad Device Graph™, the company will enable global, regional and local clients and partners to understand, monetize and measure marketing to users across screens. The Tapad Device Graph is recognized as the most accurate, scalable cross-screen solution in the market today. The decision to expand into APAC was based on increased demand from global, as well as local, brands and clients, many of which have a strong market presence throughout the region. In addition to expanding its roster of world-class data partners, plans include building a world-class team in Singapore. Over the next few months, Tapad APAC will also establish local entities in additional markets. To accelerate its ramp-up, Tapad APAC is actively recruiting in many areas, ranging from skilled and experienced solutions engineers to seasoned sales and marketing professionals. "Tapad is thrilled to be answering the call for cross-device excellence in APAC," said Pierre Martensson, GM of Tapad APAC. "Our Device Graph is adding millions of devices daily and achieves unmatched levels of scale and accuracy while protecting consumer privacy. This meets a critical need in the region." Tapad appointed Martensson as General Manager of Tapad APAC in May, kicking off expansion in the region. Martensson comes to Tapad with nearly a decade of operations experience throughout APAC, having transformed, developed and grown global organizations. To learn more about partnership and employment opportunities available with Tapad in APAC, visit www.experian.com/careers. Contact us today!