Across industries, marketing teams are navigating a brutal equation: shrinking budgets, leaner teams and rising performance pressure.
In this environment, platforms like Meta and Google dominate the ecosystem. Their unrivaled scale and AI-powered technology make them safe bets for marketing and user acquisition.
But as these leaders push further into automation, they’ve reduced the manual controls that once allowed marketers and agencies to customize campaigns based on internal data and best practices. At the same time, the limited data insights these platforms provide into campaign performance make it harder to diagnose what is working, adjust strategies in flight or optimize toward longer-term business outcomes.
These changes are creating challenges, particularly for agencies trying to demonstrate value to their marketing clients.
Though marketers and agencies themselves made the leading platforms dominant, there are ways to rebalance the media mix and improve marketing performance.
No one doubts the effectiveness of the leading platforms. But data from ecommerce marketing measurement platform Fospha found that brands allocating 21%-40% of their marketing budget outside of Google and Meta achieved the best customer acquisition costs (CACs).
In today’s high-pressure environment, diversification is no longer experimental; it’s a performance strategy.
The independent app ecosystem
This data from Fospha isn’t an anomaly. In a report from Moloco, consumer app marketers improved their day 30 return on ad spend (ROAS) by 143% for health and fitness apps, by 153% for education apps and by 214% for shopping apps when they diversified their marketing media mix beyond walled gardens to the independent app ecosystem. With consumers spending 59% of their time online on the open web, this data isn’t surprising.
Marketers have many opportunities to appeal to prospective customers contextually based on an app’s content and subject matter expertise. By targeting users outside of the walled gardens in the independent app ecosystem, app marketers reach more than two billion daily active users – that’s all of TikTok and Instagram’s users combined. And through programmatic channels, marketers can reach prospective customers across the web, both in-app and across the internet.
Alternative social platforms
Though they’re still walled gardens, social platforms like Pinterest and Reddit offer unique engagement and conversion opportunities as well.
Marketers targeting Gen Z will find that more than 200 million of the platform’s 500 million monthly global users are from that generation. According to data from the marketing measurement platform Measured, based on 70 incrementality tests, Pinterest outperformed all other view-based social platforms, including Snapchat, TikTok and Reddit, in incremental ROAS, beating second-ranked Meta by more than 20%.
Success on Pinterest depends on cultivating a loyal following and sharing relevant, shoppable content that drives engagement. Because users arrive ready to browse and buy, Pins that link directly to products, services or games tend to deliver higher interaction and conversion rates.
With 500 million monthly global users, Reddit is another platform marketers should add to their advertising mix. It’s a leading destination for real recommendations from real people. The community expects authentic and community-aligned ads that feel native and engaging to the specific subreddit community.
Historically, advertising on Reddit has been more challenging than on other platforms due to user skepticism of overly commercial marketing. That said, many marketers are generating sales on Reddit, especially when they’re transparent and genuine about what is an ad and what isn’t.
One unique feature of Reddit’s platform and community is Ask Me Anything (AMA) – sessions during which the Reddit community is invited to ask fellow users, even brands, questions. Oatly recently co-hosted an AMA, which generated a 403% higher average time on post, 900% more comments (vs. benchmarks) and a 154% upvote rate. Among those surveyed on Reddit, 89% say that they trust brands more if they’re willing to engage with the community on the platform.
Diversifying for the future
AI-driven automation has unquestionably made the leading platforms more powerful. For most marketers, they will remain core pillars of the media mix. Agencies and brands are investing heavily in understanding how these systems work and how to influence performance within increasingly constrained environments.
But in a world of shrinking budgets and rising scrutiny, reliance on any single set of platforms carries risk. Marketers must stay vigilant about creative inputs and audience strategy where they can, while expanding into complementary channels that restore flexibility, insight and incremental growth.
Diversified media strategies, spanning the independent app ecosystem and alternative social platforms like Pinterest and Reddit, can deliver stronger efficiency and unlock new audiences at scale.
The next phase of performance marketing will belong to the teams that pair platform scale with broader ecosystem experimentation, rebalancing their media mix to regain control, prove value and drive sustainable growth in a constrained environment.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Follow Zoomd and AdExchanger on LinkedIn.
For more articles featuring Omri Argaman, click here.
