DoubleVerify (DV), the media effectiveness platform, has released its 2025 Global Insights: How Consumers and Marketers Use Walled Gardens report, offering platform-level insights into how social media continues to shape digital advertising, news consumption, and commerce.
Built to examine the evolving role of “walled gardens” – closed platform ecosystems where data, inventory, and measurement are largely controlled internally – the report lands at a moment when social is simultaneously expanding its influence and raising the bar for accountability.
At the centre of DV’s messaging is a familiar tension for modern marketers: scale and performance are abundant, but sustainable value is harder to secure without clarity on what’s really happening behind the curtain.
The report’s core takeaway is direct: walled gardens promise reach and results, but long-term impact depends on transparency and trust.
“Entertainment, community, personalised experiences” – and rising expectations
DV’s CEO underlined why social media remains so commercially magnetic. The appeal, they noted, lies in platforms’ ability to blend entertainment, community, and personalised experiences across both user-generated content and advertising.
In other words, social doesn’t just host ads; it embeds them into an always-on stream of culture, conversation, and content that users have opted into daily.
But this same closeness to attention and culture is precisely why advertisers are demanding more. As investment accelerates across these environments, brands want proof – not just of delivery, but of campaign effectiveness and accountability.
DV positions its priority as helping marketers maximise media quality, efficiency, and performance across video-centric walled gardens, pointing to innovations such as DV Authentic AdVantage as evidence of continued product development in that direction.
A global sample designed to map behaviour, influence, and ad response
To build the report, DV surveyed 22,000 consumers across 21 countries, aiming to understand how people of all ages use these platforms – from how they engage with social, to how they consume news, interact with influencers, and respond to advertising.
Alongside the consumer view, DV also surveyed 1,970 marketing and advertising decision-makers worldwide to identify the key challenges and opportunities inside walled gardens.
Taken together, the dual-audience approach is meant to capture both sides of the same market: the attention economy (consumers) and the performance economy (advertisers).
EMEA and the UK: social is near-universal – and it’s beating the benchmarks
Across EMEA, social media has become an almost universal channel for brands. The report finds 90 per cent of advertisers in EMEA are active on social platforms, with the United Kingdom close behind at 87 per cent. That alone signals maturity – social is no longer “a channel to test,” but a core line item in many media strategies.
Confidence in results is also robust. 75 per cent of EMEA marketers say social feeds outperform campaign baselines, rising to 81 per cent in the UK. The same pattern appears in short-form video: 77 per cent of advertisers in EMEA and 75 per cent in the UK believe reels perform better relative to campaign baselines.
The message is consistent: social is not simply delivering reach – it’s delivering uplift.
Performance is strong – but brand suitability anxiety hasn’t disappeared
If social’s commercial value is increasingly hard to ignore, brand suitability remains the persistent question mark. In the UK, 56 per cent of advertisers report concerns about placement suitability – a notable signal that even confident spenders are still cautious about where their ads may appear.
Yet, interestingly, the data also suggests that suitability concerns don’t automatically translate into low trust. 84 per cent of advertisers in EMEA and 85 per cent in the UK consider social media newsfeeds suitable. Social video and reels are also viewed positively: 84 per cent in EMEA and 79 per cent in the UK consider these environments suitable.
This is the modern balancing act in one snapshot: strong belief in the environment’s potential, paired with heightened sensitivity to context. For many brands, it’s not that social is “unsafe” – it’s that the margin for reputational damage feels thinner, and the pace of content makes manual oversight unrealistic.
The measurement message: transparency is now a buying decision
In the UK, the most valued third-party tools are those that support post-bid media quality measurement (40 per cent) and pre-bid content alignment controls (39 per cent). That prioritisation says a lot about where the market is heading.
Post-bid measurement reflects the need to verify what actually happened after spend is deployed – a direct response to concerns around quality, fraud, and verification. Pre-bid controls reflect the desire to reduce risk before it occurs, by aligning content environments with brand expectations upfront.
Combined, they highlight a wider trend: as social investment grows, advertisers are asking for greater transparency, fraud protection, and contextual control to safeguard performance and reputation at the same time.
UK audiences are set to spend even more time on social
From the consumer side, the UK stands out as the most likely to increase social usage in the year ahead.
22 per cent of UK consumers believe they will spend more time on social media over the next 12 months, pointing to continued audience expansion — and the commercial opportunity that comes with it.
For advertisers, this matters because it suggests that social’s “attention supply” isn’t plateauing yet. More time in-platform typically means more opportunities for discovery, influence, and conversion – especially when formats like feeds and reels are already perceived as outperforming.
AI-generated content is most visible in the UK – and it changes the conversation
The report also highlights a distinctly UK-shaped signal in the wider EMEA picture: UK users report the highest visibility of AI-generated content across social media (54 per cent) and video streaming platforms (24 per cent). That level of exposure introduces new variables into creative strategy, context planning, and brand suitability.
As AI content becomes more common – and sometimes harder to distinguish from human-made content – advertisers face a new layer of complexity. The question is no longer only “where did my ad appear?” but also “what kind of content ecosystem is forming around my brand – and how quickly is it shifting?”
Social remains the engine – but the winners will be quality-first
Across the region, DV positions social as sitting at the heart of the EMEA digital advertising ecosystem, delivering both upper-funnel brand impact and consistent performance uplift.
The continued outperformance of feeds and reels suggests that video-led, socially native formats are not just popular – they are becoming central to how brands drive measurable value.
However, this growth is mirrored by increased sensitivity around brand suitability and trust, particularly in the UK, where concerns exceed the regional average. The implication is clear: as confidence in platforms rises, advertisers aren’t relaxing – they’re getting sharper. Many are leaning into context-aware planning, robust verification, and quality-first optimisation to protect brand reputation while still capturing the upside that social can offer.
Conclusion: scale is easy – sustainable value is earned
DV’s 2025 Global Insights report paints a picture of social media as both opportunity and responsibility.
Across EMEA – and especially in the UK – advertisers are active, optimistic, and seeing tangible performance uplift from feeds and reels. Consumers, meanwhile, are signalling continued growth in time spent on social, reinforcing the commercial gravity of these platforms.
But the report’s closing message is the one likely to stick: in walled gardens, scale and performance can be compelling, yet long-term value depends on trusted environments, verified delivery, and transparency-led strategy.
In an era of accelerating platform change and rising media complexity, the brands best positioned for the next phase of growth may not be the loudest spenders – but the most disciplined: those who treat media quality and trust not as an add-on, but as the foundation.
