The open web is ‘fragmented’, ‘battered’ and ‘struggling’, say media experts in agencies, consultancies and tech companies — it’s also a big opportunity for savvy marketers.
In 2024, more than half of all ad spend went to just five companies — Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon, and Alibaba — according to GroupM’s This Year, Next Year report.
‘Walled gardens have made it very easy to invest,’ says Ed Cox, founder of Yonder Media. ‘They haven’t just built their revenue models around big global brands and advertising agencies; they’ve built easy, self-access platforms for small businesses to get advertising on a credit card.’
And while Cox says that even established platforms like Facebook and Instagram still have room to grow their user base, tech companies are increasingly bumping into courts and regulators in the UK, US and EU.
‘2025 is going to be a pivotal year when many of these cases and investigations bear fruit,’ says James Rosewell, director of the Movement for an Open Web. ‘So it promises to be a real tipping point for the future of the open web.’
Risks: from brand safety to wastage
The biggest issue that advertisers have had with the open web is brand safety, and that doesn’t seem to be going away.
Last month, the research firm Adalytics found that major brands, including Adidas, Samsung and Unilever, unwittingly ran programmatic ads on websites hosting child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). Organisations including the Department of Homeland Security and even Savethechildren.org also featured next to CSAM content.
This is only the most egregious example of the risk of programmatic advertising. Despite years of brands calling for greater transparency, the Association of National Advertisers in 2023 found that $20bn of $88bn spent programmatically in the US was wasted.
Viviana Toro, head of marketing at CvE marketing consultancy, blames ‘low-quality inventory’ like made-for-advertising websites. But Hannah King, founder of Adfabric, says that ‘a lack of planning and buying skills’ within agencies also plays a part.
‘There’s amazingly powerful tech now that enables you to buy ads in a very smartly targeted way across the open web. But what I think one of the downsides of that development has been that a lot of digital teams have been less trained on how to plan and buy media,’ says King.
‘[Planners and buyers] know how to use the platforms very well, but the art of planning doesn’t exist. They end up buying a load of inventory that is really poor quality, if it is even reaching a human being,’ she added.
Opportunities exist… for smart advertisers
The upside of all this risk and lack of expertise is that it makes the open web, according to Cox, a great space for ‘smart advertisers to play’.
‘The open web still has a scale above and beyond the walled gardens’, says Toro, offering ‘billions of ways to reach potential customers, in a variety of contexts and formats.’ But to take advantage of this more level playing field, advertisers must first protect themselves through careful site selection and curation.
‘There are really strong publishers out there. As a planner, I want to look at where my audiences are, trusted environments where there’s an associational value, where my message will get attention and resonate in that context. There are some really quality media environments that do that,’ King said.
A number of media agencies pointed to Ozone as an example of a curator with good quality content and rich first-party data. Ozone, which is owned by News UK, The Guardian, The Telegraph and Reach, wants to position itself as an alternative to the walled gardens. ‘What we’re trying to do is get more money away from the walled gardens — giving an alternative to them and some of the big social platforms — and into the world of premium journalism,’ said Bryan Scott, chief marketing officer at Ozone.
According to Scott, publishers are ‘basking in first party data’ that can help advertisers target audiences more effectively. Even better, publishers can tackle brand safety issues.
‘Editorial governance is the ultimate brand safety,’ Scott said. ‘No one’s going to be appearing beside something that may be illegal, extremist or fake. We might not agree with how something is written depending on which way in the spectrum we might lean but the vast majority of the time, it will be correct because it’s regulated.’
Scott also says the belief that brands suffer when their ads appear next to negative news stories has been debunked. Stagwell’s Future of News study found that perceived purchase intent, favourability and brand image remain largely unchanged when ads appear against good or bad news. It also uncovered that 69% of executives said overapplied brand protocols are harmful to both publishers and advertisers.
As such, Scott advises advertisers to reconsider their keyword blacklists, saying that blocking topics that are ‘inherently safe just means that you get to put less things in front of the eyes of your potential customers’.
Advertisers who are preoccupied with brand safety and blacklists also overlook the importance of the creative. ‘I can’t think of an ad that I’ve seen any time recently that I’ve thought is really good,’ King said. ‘You can see that clients aren’t investing the time and budget in creative […] and creative is at least three quarters of the impact of any ad.’
This opportunity for creativity is what excites Celine Saturnino, chief executive officer at Mediaplus UK, who says clients are looking for ways to stand out in ‘a market where people are bombarded with advertising and attention rates continue to be lower.’
‘Investing into really nice creative that allows you to have some interaction with the consumer without interrupting them — which I think is a careful balance to make — is obviously a huge part of that. And that’s where I feel like it’s really interesting to look at the open web and the options for creativity within the open web versus the walled gardens,’ she said.
Integrating ads into the user experience can make a huge difference, King argues, using Facebook as an example: ‘I remember back in the day I was buying display ads on Facebook, the same ads that are now largely on the open web, and Facebook performed appallingly. You couldn’t get the cost per thousand low enough for it to convert.
‘And then one day they introduced the ad to the feed and it was an integrated part of the experience and they started delivering more relevant ads to users. You can see how well that’s doing for them now.’
King says advertisers should learn from this and collaborate with publishers to produce ads that ‘actually integrate within the user experience and enhance the experience on the platform rather than just buying an ad and stuffing it in a bit of space.’
Advertisers may soon become even more reliant on news publishers with strong editorial guidance, considering that Meta in the US recently announced it is ditching fact-checking taking a more lenient view on what’s considered hate speech. Saturnino commented on the importance of supporting quality journalism, saying, ‘I can only see that conversation becoming bigger with everything that’s happening within Meta and in global politics. It feels like at some point that will help fuel a kind of investment into the open web.’
Featured image: ThisIsEngineering / Pexels
Correction 06.03.2025: An earlier version of this article stated that Ozone is built on third-party instead of first-party data.
