Access to the walled gardens’ audiences comes with certain conditions attached — one of which is the lack of visibility on user-level data.Now other internet giants such as Alibaba, Amazon, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Twitter are keeping their data under their own walled gardens. 

Google’s technical progress spells increasingly limited data for advertisers. The company prohibited third-party data management platforms (DMPs) from firing tracking pixels in the Google Display Network and pulled YouTube inventory from Google AdEx in 2015, making it unavailable to independent demand side platforms (DSP). So Google use data access as bait for selling additional services, as it did with Mondelez in late 2014 when it required the brand use Google DoubleClick Manager rather than Mondelez’s video DSP, TubeMogul, to buy YouTube TruView ads programmatically.

It almost sounds like the tech prowess of the big Digital boys is creating on going barriers for Brands. And the big digital companies own a significant part of global advertising expenditures. In 2016, the digital ad market generated revenues globally of close to $200 billion, up from about $100 billion in 2012, and these revenues are expected to climb to over $300 billion in 2020. As a percent of total ad spending of $660 billion in 2016, digital advertising accounted for about 30% and is expected to account for almost 40% in 2020. The mobile portion of digital advertising is also increasing, moving from about 3.45% of digital ad spending to about half of all ad spending in 2016, and expected to account for almost two thirds of all digital advertising in 2020. Google & Facebook capture almost 43% of the digital advertising pie.

Facebook reports an eye-popping 1.1 billion daily users, but doesn’t say how many of those people log on for hours a day and how many for just minutes. But now Advertisers would also like to have more insight into how long most people use Facebook on a daily basis.Lack of granular reporting forces marketers to trust the reporting platforms offered by the walled gardens. A glitch in the Facebook app, for instance, was recently found to have inflated the reported US time spent using Facebook on mobile devices by up to 40% on iPhones.

What can brands do?

1.Improve Marketing attribution: complex media environment means once reliable marketing performance measurement techniques, such as marketing mix and attribution models don’t work as well. Unifying these two approaches requires new techniques to combine individual-level data with anonymous aggregate data.

2.Try & get back as much data from the Digital Big boys: Google, Facebook, and Amazon can share log files from ad campaigns with DMPs. The logs provide granular insights into campaign exposure and user engagement at an impression level, typically without sharing device or user IDs. This can enable more auditable measurement and insights about what happens within these platforms.
3.Ask Customers for data: e commerce companies are good at it. But every marketer needs to learn the art of asking their prospects & customers for more information & giving them value in exchange for it. CVS promotes discounts to its Extra Care loyalty members on Facebook and asks them to authenticate their accounts by providing their membership number and email address.

4.Use their DMPs intelligently to connect the dots. Interactive marketers use a DMP to leverage audience data collected from multiple channels (including site, email, display, search, and offline customer relationship management [CRM] data) to deliver consistent marketing messaging to users regardless of the digital channel.Marketers can use their DMPs to stage campaigns in ways that give them more granular insight on how ad exposure inside walled gardens impacted consumers. pushing hyper-segmented audiences from the DMP into walled gardens’ buying platforms, then applying an additional targeting approach to these segments — for instance breaking them into smaller age groups. Marketers should tap into internal data sources to start — direct marketing lists, CRM databases, sweepstakes participants, etc. — and connect them to their digital interaction records with data onboarding partners like Liveramp & others.

5.Integrate Marketing teams: Digital teams are often separate from teams like customer relationship management (CRM), customer experience (CX), and Customer Intelligence. Many times the teams don’t report to the same leader. So segrated teams creates silos out of the customer knowledge they possess.

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