Champions of the open internet often make an idealistic case for it. They talk about transparency, innovation, and the well-being of publishers.
The rub is that advertisers do want to spend outside the walled gardens. They just don’t know how.
Ask most marketers and they’ll tell you they’re hungry for diversification. They’re tired of rising CPMs. They want more reach, more flexibility, more value. But when they try to test the open internet, especially small or mid-sized teams, they encounter the same two roadblocks every time: complexity and attribution.
Why Advertisers Want to Expand Beyond the Walled Gardens
Talk to performance advertisers. They are likely thinking about how to move beyond Meta and Google. The reason is simple: CPMs are lower, and you can unlock truly incremental reach.
Plus, the open internet is full-funnel: run CTV and podcast campaigns, complement them with DOOH or retargeting display, and tie it all together with better creative control. Social, by comparison, is excellent for lower-funnel targeting but often less effective for awareness, education, or higher-consideration products.
The appetite is there. But the challenge is making it work.
Why It’s Still So Hard to Make the Shift
There’s a reason nearly 70% of digital ad spend still flows through the big three. For most marketers, especially those with lean teams or limited technical support, programmatic just isn’t turnkey enough.
Compared to Meta’s Advantage+ or Google’s PMax, the open internet lacks a unified interface. It doesn’t offer simple, direct attribution. It asks the buyer to stitch together multiple systems, troubleshoot tags, manage frequency caps, and interpret data across disconnected dashboards. If you’re spending a few thousand dollars a month— or even, frankly, $500,000— and your team is lean, you’re not going to hire an ad ops lead just to figure out how to test digital out of home.
Even highly motivated brands end up giving up or defaulting to what they know, not because the results aren’t there, but because the UX isn’t.
What the Open Internet Needs to Do Differently
The opportunity here is massive. Combined, search and social advertising are approximately a $500 billion global market. If the open internet wants a bigger share, it can’t rely on idealistic appeals. It has to compete on usability, measurement, and outcomes.
That means building self-serve systems. Interfaces that abstract complexity, not expose it. Workflows that don’t assume every buyer is an enterprise. And attribution that mirrors what performance marketers expect from the walled gardens: clear, timely, and tied to actual business results.
It means making data portable. If an advertiser cannot learn from their Meta campaigns and apply the learnings to CTV or DOOH, they’re unlikely to test those channels. The insights need to travel with the buyer, or those channels will remain underutilized.
If we want to unlock the next wave of programmatic growth, we need to make the open internet feel as accessible as the platforms that are hoovering up the lion’s share of every ad dollar.
The problem isn’t demand. It’s delivery.
Mike Hauptman, CEO & Founder of AdLib Media Group, is a programmatic marketer with over 17 years of experience solving complex and large-scale technical business challenges for Fortune 500 brands, agencies, and advertisers. Prior to founding AdLib, Mike was one of the first 100 employees at MediaMath, where he held various roles, including VP of Technical Business Development and Global VP of Platform Integrations.
