How AI-Driven Open Strategies Are Outperforming the Market

AI Digital, the AI-native media consultancy behind the Open Garden Framework, today announced the launch of a new animated explainer that translates the model into a clear, accessible narrative for brands, agencies, and media buyers — revealing why the performance gap is widening and how walled-garden limitations are holding back growth across the digital ecosystem.

Brands that have adopted open, AI-powered media buying strategies are significantly outperforming those reliant on single-platform buying. According to AI Digital’s proprietary data, advertisers leveraging predictive analytics across open ecosystems are seeing 2.9x higher performance, teams optimizing in real time are generating a 26% higher ROI, and organizations running agile, data-driven operations are making decisions 73% faster than those constrained by closed environments.

Why the Performance Gap Exists — and Why It’s Growing

AI Digital’s data shows that the performance differential is not accidental; it is structural. Platforms that control both the buy and sell sides of the programmatic stack have a commercial incentive to prioritize their own inventory and extract higher fees at the auction layer. Independent research has shown that vertical integration can push advertiser costs an estimated 20% above true auction price — a hidden tax that scales with spend and remains invisible to most buyers.

The downstream impact is clear: narrower inventory, fragmented attribution, and intermediaries optimizing for their own margin instead of the advertiser’s KPIs. As consumers move fluidly across channels and environments, brands must navigate five to seven distinct platforms to maintain reach, while data shows that 59% of consumers frequently switch between platforms — a behavior single walled gardens cannot cover efficiently or impartially.

The Open Garden Framework: A KPI-First Alternative

AI Digital’s Open Garden Framework was built in direct response to these conditions. Open Garden is a KPI-first operating philosophy in which brand goals lead, and every decision — from supply path to audience strategy to measurement — is made explicitly in service of the business objective.

Open Garden is not a DSP, a proprietary technology, or a closed platform. It is an operating principle and neutral layer that restores choice, transparency, and competitive advantage to brands and agencies willing to move beyond default, single-stack buying.

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"The industry has fundamentally changed—the old way of buying media no longer reflects where consumers spend their time or how platforms actually operate. With our Open Garden Framework, we’re giving brands and agencies back the choice and competitive advantage they deserve. When your media strategy is engineered around your KPIs instead of a platform’s commercial incentives, the performance gap becomes undeniable. That’s not just a feature—it’s the future of media buying." — Stephen Magli, CEO & Founder, AI Digital

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What’s Next: An All-in-One AI Marketing Intelligence Platform

The animation launch marks a broader strategic moment for AI Digital. The company is relaunching its all-in-one AI marketing intelligence platform, designed to operationalize the Open Garden Framework at scale. The platform is built to unify research, planning, activation, optimization, and reporting into a single workflow, while unlocking an estimated 5–20% cost savings through smarter audience and inventory decisions.

Note to Editors

A visual explainer animation of the Open Garden Framework is available for embedding and editorial use. 

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