Video spend: Why advertisers must look beyond the walled gardens wonderland
Opinion
Video solutions on the premium open web offer distinct, often unsung advantages, providing an alternative vision to the riches of the walled gardens, argues GumGum’s head of sales.
Think of 2025’s walled gardens as advertising’s digital wonderland. Like Alice in the book, brands are – understandably – captivated by this noisy world of personalities and ideas. But it’s also a somewhat chaotic place with uncertain boundaries, and the rules change almost constantly.
This wonderland’s lead characters – Meta, Alphabet and Amazon – are larger-than-life, attracting over half of total global ad spend outside China. According to WARC, two in five new ad dollars now go to a social media platform, and one in five are directed to both search advertising and retail media.
In today’s buoyant digital video ad market, the likes of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube (which just reported a 15% YoY leap in Q3 ad revenue) are titans. Although they have a place on a plan, brands that fail to explore other growth areas may be selling themselves short.
A recent GumGum video campaign with Mars shows why. Video completion rates and brand reach both outperformed benchmarks, but the overlap with YouTube audiences was just 1%. Over-reliance on walled gardens here would equal a major missed opportunity.
By contrast, video solutions on the premium open web offer many distinct, often unsung advantages. Led by strong editorial content, they provide an alternative vision to the riches of the walled gardens. And that difference is crucial to a video strategy that lasts the test of time.
Journalistic premium
For starters, in an age when practically anyone can create and circulate a video – regardless of its accuracy – journalistic content retains its value. Advertisers who appear alongside content produced within set editorial standards (including rigorous processes of fact-checking and sourcing) are guaranteed a level of safety that doesn’t exist among the billions of creators on social media.
This is especially true given the arrival of advanced AI tools that make it astonishingly easy to generate misinformation; for example, via fake “news” videos and political propaganda.
While there are tech vendors available to mitigate this risk, they’re not necessarily privy to the same level of transparency found on the open web. The opacity is worsened by the risk of inappropriate or poor-quality content that typically arises from high-volume UGC channels, e.g., X, TikTok, and Instagram.
And if safety is an issue, brand suitability is an even bigger ask for walled garden advertising. Moderation controversies and a lack of reporting clarity make value alignment harder than it should be.
In comparison, premium journalism on the open web is another world. Its content has breadth and integrity, on systems that can easily integrate advanced brand safety and suitability measures.
Granted, there may be less in the form of influencer star power. Yet, the flip side is a scalable, brand-safe setting that’s primed for lasting engagement.
Mindset factor
Traditional publisher environments on the open web are also tailor-made for the consumer mindset, enabling advertisers to reach relevant audiences through a series of carefully aligned content “moments”. Coupled with the in-built variety of premium content, this approach has the makings of a highly accurate targeting strategy.
Take the Mars Pedigree campaign run with GumGum. By combining creative execution with contextual intelligence and attention signals, the Mars team mapped billions of data points across the open web.
As a result, they were able to identify the content environments where audiences were most receptive to campaign messaging – and then enhance performance, using real-time metrics.
This shows how the open web can serve as a conduit to finely tuned relevance and reach. Outside the restrictions of walled gardens, brands can use contextual online video to chime with audience mindset. And they can do so in a way that feels natural and cohesive.
In an era highly sensitive to privacy concerns, the open web and its mindset advantage set the stage for advertising that is intuitive, not invasive. Personal data trade-offs don’t trap customers. Instead, they feel understood.
Finding the balance
There’s a reason why “hyperscale and hyper-capitalised” social video platforms (Deloitte) are punching above their weight right now. These walled garden giants wield enormous scale and choice. Yet savvy advertisers will do well to set aside a budget for the open web, too.
It’s no exaggeration to say that publisher survival could hinge on it.
Many media companies argue that they are being undercut by Google’s new AI Overviews, with lost referral traffic and ad revenue making the fight for independent journalism harder than ever. If digital brands want a healthy, fair ad system in the future, they must get behind publishers in the here and now.
But it’s not just ad dollars for a good cause – the experience itself is compelling.
Premium video solutions on the open web are often inherently safer than their social, UGC-driven equivalents. And they go deep, with the potential for powerful audience connection and resonance that is worth the extra spend.
Jess Aylett is the head of sales UK and International at GumGum