As Walled Gardens Become A Maze, How Can Ecommerce Advertisers Find A Path Forward? 

By Sarah Lawson Johnston

As walled gardens grow more unpredictable, ecommerce brands can build resilience by diversifying across the open web, owning their data and enabling seamless, interactive commerce everywhere. 

For ecommerce brands planning marketing campaigns, the appeal of social media platforms is undeniable. With vast, engaged audiences, precise targeting and re-targeting, and self-serve activation, they provide a cost-effective way to reach consumers. TikTok alone demonstrates this commercial pull,  projected to generate more than $34 billion in global ad revenue in 2026, with its newly restructured US operations accounting for over $17 billion. 

But while social media platforms and other walled gardens offer huge opportunities, they can also be unpredictable.  

When TikTok went dark for US users in January 2025 amid regulatory uncertainty, the knock-on effects were immediate: Meta ad spend surged as budgets were reallocated, and CPMs on its platforms jumped by over 10%. Although TikTok ultimately resolved its situation in January 2026, with its US operations transitioning to a new American-majority joint venture, the episode served as a reminder that no platform is too big to be disrupted. 

Similarly, Meta’s decision to remove independent fact-checkers from Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with a community-driven model, sparked widespread concern about brand safety at the start of last year. In practice, many advertisers stayed the course, and Meta reported strong revenue growth through the year. This suggests that even in volatile environments, a strategy of inertia still dominates much of ecommerce media planning.  

Social platforms may have advanced targeting and measurement tools, yet measuring them against one another continues to be a challenge for marketers, where every platform defines engagement and conversion attribution differently. Even when marketers consolidate campaign data into one central location, these mismatched platform metrics and conflicting rules make equivalent comparison impossible. Instead of struggling to align irreconcilable platform data, ecommerce brands must take back control with an open, standardised omnichannel strategy.  

Ecommerce brands need to own their data  

The first step ecommerce brands must take is to focus on first-party data and utilise this across the open web. Effective targeting strategies built on a solid foundation of first-party data will set up advertisers for success in the long term; helping them achieve success not just in walled gardens but outside them too. With a renewed focus on the open web, encompassing relationships with premium publishers, curated content platforms, and retail media networks, marketers can effectively diversify their strategy to build commercial resilience.  

A typical customer journey spans dozens of touchpoints daily, from social feeds to premium publisher sites. Limiting commerce opportunities to a single website or social shop creates unnecessary friction. Instead, brands should enable conversion at every step on a consumer’s journey. This is the core principle of commerce everywhere: moving beyond a single standalone storefront to embed transactional capabilities across every surface where discovery occurs. 

The convenience of ecommerce, especially within social platforms, has changed consumer behaviours. Features like TikTok Shop have done much to instil an ‘always-shopping’ mindset. AI-powered interfaces are also changing the way people discover products. Consumers expect to be able to make purchases at any time. While social platforms have normalised instant buying, traditional open-web media often falls behind on convenience. Without embedded commerce capabilities across these touchpoints, brands end up sparking consumer interest only to let the conversion opportunity slip away.  

Catering for the always-shopping mindset 

There are several areas where ecommerce brands can focus in their quest to take full advantage of these new consumer behaviours. As they look to strengthen their appeal to consumers across the open web, interactive video is a format marketers should be experimenting with.   

These videos go beyond simple, passive experiences that rely on consumers taking the initiative to make several clicks to eventually arrive at your website. Assuming of course, that they don’t get distracted or abandon their journey along the way. Instead, interactive video lets a viewer engage directly with content, selecting which products they want to take a closer look at, with the ability to access further information about the item in question, such as specifications, availability, and price.  

Taking this one step further, the in-stream checkout can be added to interactive videos, which enables consumers to purchase products without ever leaving the content. It eliminates friction from the buyer journey. There are no redirects, just a seamless experience that fully caters to the always-shopping mindset. The brands and platforms that win in commerce will be those that solve the transaction layer, not simply those that control the storefront. 

If every engagement with a consumer is interactive and potentially transactable, advertisers can continue to own the relationship with their customers. No matter where the consumer interacts with an ad, within a walled garden or on the open web, marketers can capture valuable commerce signals from that engagement, learning more about what a customer is interested in and how effective their content is in driving desired outcomes.  

Takeaway: Manage risks with a diversified approach 

While they would be ill-advised to abandon them altogether, ecommerce brands don’t have to rely solely on social platforms. A diversified approach will lower a brand’s risk profile and help it meet customers wherever they are. 

Premium publishers on the open web play host to curated, brand-safe environments with engaged audiences, where advertisers can stay in full control and don’t have to play by someone else’s rules that can change without notice. Investing in content commerce strategies with premium publishers provides brands and retailers with greater independence, more resilient measurement, and strategies that can withstand whatever disruption the walled gardens deliver next.

About the Author

Sarah Lawson Johnston is the Managing Director of EMEA at Vudoo and has over 30 years of expertise in advertising technology. Excited by the immense potential of commerce media, Sarah’s vision is to accelerate Vudoo’s impact across key markets by enhancing content and ad strategies for publishers, agencies, and brands.