These are boom times for digital advertising. While the pandemic battered the economy, the job market, and consumer confidence, it did little to quash a bonanza in digital ad spending. Still, there are challenges ahead for the industry, including grappling with the thorny issue of measuring ad performance across fragmented media platforms and walled gardens.

UK regulators prune Meta’s walled garden: Meta has been ordered to sell Giphy, and new ownership could bring back the GIF database’s popular ad program, without the antitrust concerns.

These walled gardens can help insurers reach audiences during the “screenless” times of their day, while allowing for effective targeting and segmentation. Further boosting their appeal, we expect advertising on audio platforms to become more sophisticated, primarily via the addition of visual ad experiences.

Spotify could break away from Google and Apple’s payment duopoly: Google’s alternative payments pilot program might only serve higher-profile apps, leaving smaller developers in the lurch.

Opening its walled garden to more third-party partnerships could help Amazon increase sales. This move advances its push into payments by bringing it one step closer to launching a full-suite online checkout solution for small sellers—which we highlighted earlier as a key innovation for this demographic.

The metaverse will finally meet Apple’s walled garden when Oculus Quest 2 headset users receive an update that lets them send their workout data to Apple’s Health app. Why it’s worth watching: The metaverse is a mostly isolated VR ecosystem, but a new update to Meta’s VR headsets will let users share their fitness data with Apple Health, which could result in wider adoption, per AppleInsider.

Even China’s walled-garden providers (which have exclusive access to China’s 937.4 million digital video viewers) have been unable to accrue viewers like Netflix has. China’s leading service, Tencent Video, will have just 320.6 million viewers this year. Read the full report.

WeChat remains the undisputed leader of social networking inside China’s walled garden, but Douyin’s ascent has been astounding. This year, Douyin will grow again, by 8.3%, to reach 692.5 million users. Behind the Numbers: eMarketer's Forecast Methodology.

The news: The metaverse will finally meet Apple’s walled garden when Oculus Quest 2 headset users receive an update that lets them send their workout data to Apple’s Health app.

Looking forward: Streaming services are battling competition on multiple fronts, and ad-supported tiers with a softer entry price are yet another option that allows competitors to appeal to both cost-conscious consumers and advertisers looking to reach audiences inside walled gardens.

The breakdown of China’s walled garden of digital platforms and payment systems by antitrust regulations will increase consumer choice. As a result, shoppers starting their customer journey on competing properties (like Tencent’s WeChat or various ByteDance apps and networks) are more likely to eventually convert on an Alibaba property than they were before.

As advertisers grow more comfortable tying their ad spending to direct sales or other measurable outcomes, it places more power in the hands of walled gardens—closed environments where users must register and log in using email addresses. Marketers must grow more comfortable with figuring out how to marry their customer data with the data that walled gardens have about their users.

Walled gardens will drive gains in CTV, social platforms, and retail media networks. Ads within the triopoly—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—are programmatic by default, and their share of total US display ad spending is growing compared with nontriopoly publishers.

As walled gardens—which have long granted providers access to data, guaranteed loyalty, and widespread acceptance from sellers—open their gates, existing mobile payment providers might be on the hunt for ways to use change to their advantage.

Jonathan Adams, executive director and managing partner at Wavemaker, joins eMarketer co-founder and Insider Intelligence chief evangelist Geoff Ramsey in a conversation about the health of the ad ecosystem amid unprecedented disruption. Among the many topics they cover are the balance between subscription- and ad-supported video and the role of walled gardens.

If collecting first-party data isn’t an option, shifting ad spending to walled gardens is another alternative. The popularity of this option is evident in the massive increase in the cost of advertising on platforms like Facebook or Google. In addition to the previously mentioned increase in Facebook CPMs, the cost per click for Google Search ads increased 41% between Q3 2020 and Q3 2021, per Merkle.

Even China’s walled-garden providers (which have exclusive access to China’s 937.4 million digital video viewers) have been unable to accrue viewers like Netflix has. China’s leading service, Tencent Video, will have just 320.6 million viewers this year. Regionally, Netflix’s Viewership Still Centers on Developed Economies. Netflix’s biggest viewer base is in its home country, the US.

The mandated breakup of the major platforms’ “walled gardens” should help Baidu’s ad business, as Alibaba’s Taobao, WeChat’s Mini Programs, and other previously blocked content will be increasingly discoverable through Baidu search results. Even though China’s new data laws led to near-total stagnation in the digital ad market during H2 2021, we do expect that companies will adjust to them in 2022.

Within digital media channels, probably the longest-standing gap in measurement information lies with the walled gardens—a group that includes Google, Facebook, a host of other walled social platforms, and Amazon. Some in the industry are also talking more of walled gardens—or attempts to build them—in the connected TV (CTV) or over-the-top (OTT) space.

After all, not all partners (read: walled gardens) will choose to share their data in all clean rooms. “If clean rooms actually take off—and all indications are that they will—in four years, we’ll be having the same conversation around, ‘how do I solve for reach when I’ve got five clean rooms activated?’” said Moe Chughtai, global head of advanced TV at MiQ. QR Codes: Fad or the Future of Measurement?

Rely more heavily on first-party data available in walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Leverage universal identifiers when available. Collect and maintain their own first-party data to supplement what’s available through publishers and ad tech platforms. Contextual targeting, particularly with advanced tactics aided by AI and machine learning, is having a renaissance.

If Samsung can successfully weave together services and experiences that move from smartphones, wearables, PCs, smart TVs, and smart home devices, it can potentially rival Apple’s walled garden.