Two thirds of marketers pulled mobile budget out of the walled gardens
A new EMARKETER report shows transparency, not just reach, is now driving mobile budget decisions.
Mariano De Vitto · September 2026
Nearly two thirds of marketers, 63.9 percent, have shifted mobile ad budget away from walled gardens like Google and Meta toward independent partners, according to new EMARKETER research. The finding lands as the in app advertising market races toward 235.1 billion dollars, making it one of the clearest signals yet that programmatic buyers are rethinking where their mobile dollars go and, more importantly, why.
For more than a decade, walled gardens have set the terms of digital advertising. Google, through Search, YouTube and its vast ad network, and Meta, through Facebook and Instagram, built businesses on scale, targeting precision and closed loop measurement. That scale came with a tradeoff: advertisers rarely get a clear view into exactly where their ads appear, how impressions get verified, or how attribution models inside these platforms actually work. For years, that opacity was accepted as the cost of reach.
The Walled Garden Problem
The EMARKETER data, published in its report on marketers prioritizing transparency, points to a growing frustration with closed ecosystems that limit visibility into where ads run, how performance is measured, and who ultimately profits from the spend. That frustration is not new, but the scale of the shift, nearly two out of three marketers, suggests it has crossed a tipping point rather than remaining a niche complaint from performance marketing teams.
Independent mobile partners are positioning themselves as the alternative, offering clearer reporting on placement, inventory quality, and attribution, areas where walled gardens have historically kept marketers at arm's length. For programmatic buyers used to third party verification in other channels, extending that same rigor to mobile in app inventory is less a revolution than an overdue correction.
Stakes Rise With Scale
For programmatic teams, this shift is not just philosophical. With the in app market approaching 235 billion dollars, the stakes around measurement accuracy and fraud exposure are rising in parallel. Marketers moving budget to independent partners are effectively betting that transparency will translate into better optimization and stronger trust with finance and leadership teams who scrutinize ad spend more closely than ever.
That scrutiny is compounded by the technical realities of mobile advertising, where fragmented SDKs, multiple measurement partners, and app store policy shifts already make attribution harder than on the open web. Independent partners that can demonstrate rigorous, verifiable reporting have an opening to win budget precisely because walled gardens have long asked marketers to trust the platform's own numbers without independent confirmation.
What Marketers Should Do Next
Why it matters: marketing teams should treat this shift as a mandate to audit their own mobile stack now. If two thirds of peers are already reallocating budget for transparency reasons, staying entirely inside walled gardens risks both competitive disadvantage and weaker data access.
The practical next step is straightforward, evaluate independent partners on measurement rigor, not just reach, before the next budget cycle locks in old habits. Teams that wait risk defaulting into the same closed reporting relationships for another year, even as peers extract clearer data and stronger negotiating leverage from a market moving unmistakably toward transparency.
The Signal Brief · Mariano De Vitto — Head of Marketing, Barcelona