Why we can’t ignore the brand safety cost of walled gardens
Partner content
The open internet offers something the walled gardens structurally cannot – genuine supply chain transparency. The Trade Desk’s VP Northern Europe explains.
Consumers spend the majority of their online time on the open internet, across streaming, news, audio, podcasts and beyond. And yet roughly 70% of digital ad budgets flow to walled gardens where that same audience spends less than half their time.
These numbers have been in front of advertisers’ eyes for years, and yet budget allocations don’t change. We talk about media efficiency, just not this glaring budget-to-time-spent gap.
This gap is a structural problem; it’s a sign that executives aren’t piecing together consumer perceptions of these platforms – and where their brand is showing up. The lawsuit that recently found two of the world’s largest social platforms liable for intentionally building addictive algorithms makes it hard to ignore.
Budget concentration is a brand safety issue
Brand safety is a core part of any media planning conversation. No brand wants its ad to be adjacent to harmful content. Contextual advertising, blocklists, inclusion lists, and keyword exclusions have all played their part in keeping brands ‘safe’. But this thinking is insufficient.
The new question is: Is our business helping a harmful platform thrive?
Platforms built on advertising revenue have a structural incentive to prioritise engagement above everything else. That’s not a new observation, but the recent legal ruling has put it front and centre in a way that’s hard to set aside. For agencies and brands, it’s a useful moment to review whether current budget allocations reflect where audiences actually are, and what environments are genuinely delivering.
Agencies and brands hold meaningful power here. Advertising revenue is central to the monetisation of content on these platforms, which in turn gives them the capital to absorb regulatory fines, resist structural reform, and sustain the very practices now being scrutinised in courtrooms.
Reviewing where budgets go – and why – is not a peripheral concern for socially conscious brands and agencies. It is a core media planning responsibility.
With consumer perceptions shifting faster than most media plans account for, the brands and advertisers that move quickly can establish themselves as beacons for a more positive, safer internet.
Brandwatch’s State of Social 2026 research found that conversations about social media platforms being “fun” have been on a steady decline since 2023, while mentions of anxiety in social media and mental health conversations are up 25%. Audiences are increasingly associating these platforms with negative experiences.
A commercial and ethical case for the open internet
At The Trade Desk, we believe that premium, transparent advertising environments combine performance and brand building in both the immediate and long–term.
Our report, The Premium Payoff, found that more than eight in 10 consumers are more likely to trust brands that advertise on premium platforms.
Premium media is 1.5x more effective at improving positive brand perceptions than less premium alternatives. It drives stronger purchase intent. Premium media feeds directly into the commercial outcomes for which budgets are being held accountable.
The open internet also offers something the walled gardens structurally cannot – genuine supply chain transparency.
When a brand runs a campaign on the open internet through a platform like The Trade Desk, it can see – at a granular level – where its money has gone, what it was placed against, how it performed, and what it cost to get there. That visibility is the baseline for media planning.
There is also a reach argument that still isn’t being made loudly enough. The open internet spans streaming platforms, quality news publishers, audio, retail media environments and more. These are not niche or residual audiences. They are the same audiences brands are trying to reach – leaned in, in contextually relevant environments, not doomscrolling past an ad wedged between algorithmically generated content.
Where the industry needs to go
The budget imbalance between where audiences spend their time and where money follows them will not correct itself. Inertia is deeply embedded. The platforms that benefit from it have too much invested in keeping it in place.
What corrects it is deliberate decision-making at the planning stage. That means treating supply chain transparency as a standard, not a differentiator. It means measuring the full funnel impact of premium placements – brand perception, purchase intent, long-term equity – not just the immediate metrics that closed platforms make easy to surface.
And it means recognising that the open internet’s comparative disadvantage has never been performance. It has been friction: complexity in access, inconsistency in measurement, and a lack of collective advocacy from those who stand to benefit most from it.
Removing that friction is what we are focused on. The goal for DSPs is to make the open internet as easy to access as any closed ecosystem. Investing in the open internet is an investment in a more positive, safe internet, one that is better for advertisers, better for publishers, and better for the consumers at the end of every campaign.
The ruling will not change these platforms’ business models on its own. But it has given the industry a clear moment to ask whether its current habits reflect its stated values. For those prepared to act on the answer, the commercial case has never been stronger.
Phil Duffield is the VP Northern Europe at The Trade Desk