Every morning, like most of us, I sit down at my inbox to sift through the latest haul of (mostly junk) email that arrived at the crack of dawn: invitations to no fewer than three webinars, Facelift community management notifications, some dev spam related to an API I don't understand, and the occasional SEO guru trying to cold sell their services.
It varies.
But one thing appears day after day: a marketing email from another SaaS program with another boilerplate headline text failing to hook me into adding yet another something to Facelift's tech stack.
And I am far from alone in this. In fact, I'm frequently the person on the other side trying to convince people to care about what we do.
The irony is that every new tool claims to simplify your stack, yet every new subscription makes the ecosystem bigger, more unwieldy, and harder to hold together.
It's no surprise that marketing leaders today find themselves frustrated by fundamental choices in how they build their technology stack and strategy. The decision is whether to embrace an open ecosystem of interoperable tools or remain within a walled garden of closed platforms.
The distinction is more than buzzwords – it shapes how marketers access data, integrate innovations, and reach customers across channels. Today, we're facing skyrocketing martech complexity and customer expectations, and this choice has real consequences for agility and ROI.
This report examines what open ecosystems and walled gardens mean for the marketing industry, backed by the latest research and figures, to help senior marketers make informed decisions.
The term walled garden refers to a closed digital ecosystem where a company keeps users and data largely contained within its own platform.
In advertising, for example, a walled garden platform handles all ad buying, targeting, tracking, and reporting internally, offering marketers a one-stop solution, but on the platform’s terms.
Tech giants like Google, Meta (Facebook), Amazon, and other major players exemplify this model. These platforms provide access to massive audiences and rich first-party data, which is constantly updated and highly accurate, enabling marketers to reach target segments efficiently. The closed nature of walled gardens also grants their owners tight control over the user experience and especially over their most valuable asset – customer data.
Advantages: Walled gardens can yield benefits such as granular data insights and high user engagement within the platform’s walls. Because all interactions occur in one environment, marketers can often measure user behavior in detail. In fact, this industry guide notes that the primary benefit of walled gardens is greater control over user data compared to the open web.
This control can reduce certain risks: due to strict oversight, ad fraud is lower in walled gardens, and ad performance can be optimized within a unified system. Many brands also find it convenient that walled gardens offer all-in-one suites of tools advertisers can use to execute campaigns end-to-end without needing external integrations.
Drawbacks: However, these benefits come at a cost. By design, walled gardens limit openness and interoperability. Marketers operating in a walled garden have limited reach beyond that platform’s audience and difficulty integrating with external tools or data sources.
Each walled garden is a silo: data often cannot easily flow out to the user's other systems, and cross-platform measurement becomes a major challenge. For over a decade, advertisers have struggled with cross-media measurement precisely because each walled garden guards its data, and even initiatives to bridge these gaps face uncertainty in how much the giants will truly cooperate.
The result is a fragmented view of customers; for example, a consumer that interacts with a brand across Facebook, Google Search, and the open web, will produce siloed reports from each of these platforms with no real unified picture. Moreover, marketers sacrifice some control over customer experience – they must play by the platform’s rules and interfaces, unable to fully customize the environment to their brand’s needs.
Importantly, walled gardens also concentrate power with the platform owners. Today, a handful of these closed ecosystems dominate digital advertising: they command a majority of web traffic and ad revenue, while the share of the open web in ad spend has been shrinking. This dominance can create vendor lock-in for marketers – once most of your audience targeting and data reside inside one garden, leaving can be painful. It’s not surprising that skepticism is growing. Even some publishers and advertisers worry about being “on rented land,” entirely dependent on a few big platforms’ policies.
In the words of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, “When you close systems off… open systems will continue to leapfrog closed systems.” Over the long term, closed environments can stifle the flexibility to adopt new channels or innovations outside the garden’s walls.
Of course, the real problem with walled gardens isn’t just the technology. It's the way they quietly normalize inefficiency. You find yourself designing campaigns to suit the quirks of a platform, not the needs of your audience or employees. You adapt, work around, make peace with the blind spots. But over time, it starts to feel like you're doing marketing on someone else's terms.
In contrast, an open ecosystem is an approach where multiple platforms and tools interoperate, allowing data and workflows to connect across organizational or vendor boundaries. Rather than a single monolithic suite, an open ecosystem is akin to a network or mosaic of composable solutions working together. Marketers in an open ecosystem aren’t confined to one vendor’s toolkit – they have the freedom to plug in new, emerging technologies quickly and seamlessly as needs evolve.
Key values defining an open ecosystem include accessibility, interoperability, and transparency. In practice, this means systems that can easily exchange data via APIs, integrations that allow unified measurement, and clear insight into performance across all channels. As NextRoll CEO Roli Saxena describes it, an open ecosystem enables “consistency… being accessible, being interoperable, being transparent and being able to run campaigns across all of the different places that consumers are and measure effectiveness across the board."
In an open ecosystem, a marketing has the ability to use best-of-breed tools for different functions – for instance, a specialized content management system, a separate social media management platform, an analytics dashboard, and an email automation tool – but knit them together so they act as one cohesive system.
Data flows freely (with proper security and privacy controls) between these components, creating a unified view of the customer. Because no single vendor holds all the keys, marketers can avoid the trap of closed data silos. They can also mix and match solutions, choosing the “right tool for the job” in each domain without being locked in. If a new social network rises or a new AI-powered marketing tool emerges, an open ecosystem approach lets the CMO incorporate it into their stack faster and with less disruption than a rigid all-in-one platform would allow.
This concept aligns closely with the rising trend of composable marketing or composable martech architecture. Composability means systems are built from modular components that can be reconfigured as needed. Gartner predicts that by 2027, organizations adopting composable tech will outpace competitors by 80% in deploying new features and innovations. In other words, open ecosystems are not just philosophically appealing – they are slated to deliver a tangible speed advantage in adapting to change. Marketing thought leaders like Scott Brinker (editor of ChiefMartec) have gone so far as to call composability “the future of marketing technology”, noting that businesses need the flexibility to combine different products and swap in new capabilities on demand. An open ecosystem provides exactly that flexibility.
Open ecosystems aren’t a silver bullet; they’re a shift in philosophy. They don’t promise perfection, but they do promise possibility: a way to reframe complexity as coordination, and to bring scattered tools into harmony. And for marketers stuck wrestling with rogue platforms and patchwork processes, that possibility means everything.
Interoperability and Unified Data: All tools in the ecosystem share data through integrations, reducing silos. This enables the coveted 360-degree customer view. Marketers report that without unifying these touchpoints, identifying audiences across channels has become enormously difficult – 70% say it’s harder than ever to recognize the same customer across different platforms. An open ecosystem tackles this by connecting those data dots, so engagement on your website, mobile app, social media, and email can all be seen in one place.
Agility and Speed of Innovation: Because components can be added or replaced independently, marketing teams gain agility. They can pilot a new tool or channel without a months-long replatforming. For example, when IKEA shifted to a composable architecture, it cut the time to deploy new features from months to weeks and was able to support a 300% increase in digital sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, Ulta Beauty achieved a 40% improvement in campaign performance after revamping their data and analytics into a composable, open architecture. The open ecosystem keeps marketing technology in sync with fast-changing consumer behavior and opportunities.
Freedom from Vendor Lock-In: Open ecosystems prevent any one vendor from holding all your capabilities hostage. If a platform’s pricing becomes unsustainable or its innovation lags, you can swap it out without collapsing your whole marketing operation. This competitive freedom pushes providers to offer better integration and service. It also means best-of-breed strategy: choose the top solutions for each function (CRM, content, social, analytics, etc.) and combine them, rather than accepting mediocre components in an all-in-one bundle. Marketers gain control over how they work and can tailor the stack to their unique needs.
Transparency and Measurement: Open ecosystems typically favor independent measurement and transparency. Instead of taking a walled garden’s self-reported metrics at face value, marketers in an open setup can use third-party analytics that track performance across channels with common standards. This makes it easier to attribute results and optimize spending. As advertising leaders have noted, black-box metrics are no longer acceptable – sophisticated marketers demand verification and consistent measurement across the board. An interoperable ecosystem makes that possible.
Cost Efficiency and ROI: While it may seem counterintuitive, an integrated open stack can reduce waste and cost in the long run. Studies show that martech stacks today are bloated with underutilized tools; marketers use only about 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities on average, down from 42% just a couple of years ago. That means companies are paying for a lot of shelfware. The culprit is often poor integration – systems that don’t talk to each other, leading teams to abandon features or use manual workarounds. An open ecosystem emphasizes proper integration, so each tool’s value is fully realized as part of a cohesive workflow. It also avoids the “tool overload” problem: instead of constantly buying new point solutions (and duplicating capabilities), marketers can consolidate and streamline. Simplifying the stack yields efficiency. In fact, when martech is integrated, organizations report lower operational costs and better marketing ROI through the elimination of redundant efforts.
The push toward open ecosystems is gaining momentum now because the pain of fragmented marketing tech has hit a breaking point. The marketing technology landscape counts an astonishing 14,000+ solutions available in 2024 – up nearly 28% from the year prior. This explosion of options without corresponding consolidation has left many marketing teams with a patchwork of disconnected tools. Recent research claims by CMSwire found the average organization uses about 75 different martech tools across their various teams. Even focusing on core systems, roughly two-thirds of marketers say they use 16 or more tools in their daily work.
The consequences are visible in the bottom line. Gartner’s data shows that marketers have grown wary of pouring more budget into technology that isn’t yielding value. By 2025, martech’s share of the total marketing budget fell to 22%, down from 30% in 2023. This pullback doesn’t indicate that marketing technology is unimportant – rather, it reflects frustration with underperforming investments. Integration challenges, data silos, and low utilization are eroding confidence in the current approach. In many companies, tech spend was reallocated towards data and analytics or even back to media because the existing stack wasn’t delivering insights or efficiency as promised.
Senior marketers and CMOs are thus at an inflection point: continue adding point solutions and chasing the mirage of a fully integrated suite, or step back and rethink architecture and strategy. Industry experts advocate the latter – a shift in mindset from tool-first to outcome-first thinking. Rather than buying yet another application to solve a problem, leading teams are focusing on how to better connect what they already have and only adopt new components that can plug into an overarching framework.
Notably, even the big walled gardens are feeling pressure to open up, at least partially. For example, in 2025 the social platform Snap announced it would integrate its once-closed ad data with a third-party cross-platform measurement provider. This was heralded as a sign that even walled gardens recognize advertisers’ demand for a more open ecosystem, the first move of its kind among major social networks. And indeed, for the first time in 2023, walled gardens as a group actually lost a small share of the programmatic ad market, according to eMarketer, as more brands sought alternatives.
Meanwhile, on the technology vendor side, a new crop of marketing tech collaborations and “composable” platforms have emerged. These are not traditional single-suite products, but collections of integrated applications designed to work in concert.
Entirely is one of the first examples of such an open ecosystem. Rather than selling one standalone software, where multiple best-in-class solutions (from content management to social engagement to planning and analytics) are aligned, but can also integrate with additional third-party tools. The future of Martech isn’t built in silos – it’s powered by community. Real impact will come from collaboration, not isolation.
Entirely's early deliverables illustrate the promise of open ecosystems: in 2025, two of its founding components (Censhare and Marmind) unveiled a combined solution that unifies budgeting, campaign planning, digital asset management, product information, and content distribution in one seamless interface. This kind of deep integration across formerly siloed capabilities shows how marketers could, for instance, plan a campaign, manage creative assets, publish across channels, and track performance – all without jumping between disconnected systems. It effectively creates a single “marketing cockpit” for end-to-end execution.
For CMOs and marketing leaders evaluating their next moves, the rise of open ecosystems carries several implications:
Strategic Alignment Over One-Stop Shopping: Rather than asking which single platform can do everything, ask how to achieve alignment among the tools you truly need. This may involve consolidating redundant tools (simplifying the stack) and ensuring the remaining ones can integrate. A deliberate audit of your current martech stack is a good starting point: identify where data or content silos exist or where a lack of flexibility is holding back strategy. These are the gaps an open approach can fill, and Communication Orchestration can also help enable teams. to work more efficiently across tools and silos.
Demand Interoperability from Vendors: When selecting any new marketing technology, interoperability should be a top criterion. Insist on open APIs, native integrations, or participation in integration ecosystems. Vendors are increasingly aware that they must play nice with others. As a marketing leader, you have leverage to choose partners who embrace openness. Some forward-thinking providers even join alliances (like the MACH Alliance for microservices-based tech) to certify their commitment to open, composable architectures. By favoring such partners, you future-proof your investments.
Build Internal Integration Capabilities: An open ecosystem doesn’t assemble itself – it requires robust internal capabilities in data integration, IT collaboration, and governance. Nearly 81% of IT leaders say data silos are hindering digital transformation efforts today, reflecting how challenging integration can be. Marketing and IT teams should work hand-in-hand to establish a unified data layer or middleware (for example, a customer data platform or data warehouse that all tools feed into). Additionally, consider appointing a martech architect or cross-functional team responsible for maintaining the connective tissue of your stack. They ensure new tools are onboarded with the right data mappings and that workflows truly flow across systems.
Measure What Matters Across the Ecosystem: Redefine your success metrics to focus on cross-channel outcomes. Rather than siloed KPIs (e.g., email click rates or single-platform ROI), emphasize metrics that capture customer journeys and overall marketing impact. This might include customer lifetime value lift, multi-touch attribution models, or conversion rates across combined channels. An open ecosystem will give you the data to measure these; make sure your analytics approach takes advantage of it. This holistic measurement will further justify the open ecosystem approach by revealing improvements not visible when data was fragmented.
Foster a Culture of Openness and Experimentation: Finally, prepare your organization culturally to maximize an open ecosystem. Teams should be trained on, and encouraged to experiment with new tools or integrations that could improve results, knowing that the architecture can accommodate change. Breaking down silos isn’t only a technology task – it’s also about encouraging collaboration across previously separate functions (for instance, your social media team sharing insights with your email team, because now they can see combined data). Leadership can set the tone by celebrating cross-team wins and making sure every function sees the unified customer strategy as a shared mission, not a competition for credit.
If the last few years have taught marketers anything, it’s that complexity is inevitable, but chaos isn’t. The difference lies in how systems are built, and how teams are supported. The promise of open ecosystems is alignment. It’s the ability to spend less time fixing and more time communicating.
Our industry is moving toward a more open, interconnected future. Faced with the shortcomings of walled gardens and fragmented stacks, leading organizations are championing openness – not as a feel-good ideal, but as a practical strategy to drive growth and cut costs. An open ecosystem enables clarity, agility, and resilience in a time of rapid change. Marketers can finally integrate their customer experiences across channels, respond instantly to new trends, and continuously incorporate the best innovations the market has to offer. No single provider, however large, can keep up with the pace of marketing innovation today in isolation. By embracing an ecosystem mindset, marketers shift from being tool operators to being orchestrators of a flexible, ever-evolving marketing engine.
This shift is well underway. In the words of Scott Brinker, a thought leader in martech, brands “need the freedom to plug in new, emerging technologies quickly and seamlessly” – those that do so will have a competitive edge. The winners in the coming years will be the organizations that build partnerships and integrations to unlock collective capabilities, rather than betting everything on one closed platform.
For CMOs, the mandate is clear: it’s time to break down the walls that separate data, teams, and technologies. By cultivating an open ecosystem, marketing leaders can turn complexity into strength – creating a marketing machine that is not only connected, but truly aligned to deliver exceptional customer experiences and business outcomes at scale.
For senior marketers interested in exploring the power of open ecosystems, an upcoming industry event offers a unique opportunity. Entirely Summit 2025 – taking place on October 29–30, 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal – is dedicated to the open ecosystem movement in marketing. This summit will showcase the next phase of open marketing technology, expert keynotes on AI, composability, and the future of martech, as well as real-world case studies from early adopters. Don’t miss the opportunity to be part of this conversation and gain practical insights into building your own open ecosystem. Learn more about the event and how to register on Entirely’s official summit page. Embracing the future of marketing starts with staying informed – and the Entirely Summit promises to equip you with the knowledge and connections to lead in the era of open ecosystems.