As September drew to a close, so did Oracle Advertising. The withdrawal from the ad business had been abruptly announced during an earnings call in June this year. Since then, Oracle’s premium customer base has been looking for new ad platforms while talented staff members have been looking for new opportunities.
The history of Oracle advertising goes back 10 years, beginning with the acquisition of cloud DMP BlueKai and consumer data platform Datalogix. Oracle went on to bring other premium applications into its ad stack including analytics suite Moat and contextual and brand safety platform Grapeshot.
It seems a good time to look back at those 10 years — and look forward too.
Dig deeper: Oracle says goodbye to the adtech business
A bittersweet end to the chapter
Michelle Hulst was there from before the beginning. She spent over nine years helping grow Datalogix, went to Oracle with the acquisition and spent a further five-and-a-half years with the Oracle ad business. She’s now President of contextual-first ad platform GumGum.
“I was there from the very beginning when we built Datalogix,” she told us. “We got acquired by Oracle shortly after BlueKai was acquired. Then I was instrumental, as well as other folks on the executive team with me, in the acquisitions of companies like Moat and Grapeshot, AddThis, Crosswise, a whole host of them. Each of these companies was a great company on their own. It’s bittersweet when the end of a chapter closes. But I am excited about how folks, with Oracle Advertising shutting down, will go on to contribute to the industry.”
Did the closure come as a shock to Hulst? “I think it was surprising to a lot of folks in the industry,” Hulst said, “because it was a pretty abrupt announcement. But Oracle is a huge business with a lot of different areas of focus and I think that the advertising business was not as front-and-center as some of their other businesses.”
Chris Feo, chief business officer at Experian Marketing Services, described it as a partial surprise. “There was definitely some signs of disruption,” he said, referring to management changes in particular, “but a full closing of the doors was not what the market had anticipated by any means.”
Had the Oracle advertising model, essentially built around a DMP, become old-fashioned? “Not necessarily,” said Feo, emphasizing that component parts of the Oracle ad stack like Grapeshot and Moat had continued potential for growth. “General data marketplaces — the old DMP business — where that’s evolved is data marketplaces sitting natively in many of the [ad] buying platforms instead of being standalone solutions. LiveRamp Data Marketplace and others, they’re still healthy, growing businesses.”
Dig deeper: Oracle enhances its Unity CDP offering
Oracle’s decision means opportunities for adtech
Of course, one consequence of the shutdown is that a lot of Oracle Advertising customers have been looking for alternatives. “I think the whole industry is aware of that,” Hulst laughed. “We’ve seen this in our industry with other things, like GDPR. It took a forcing function in order to make a change. With Oracle closing down — and a lot of the current ways that clients are leveraging data to reach their consumers going away — they’re now in the process of looking for new ways. Sometimes those forcing functions force us to seek alternatives that may be better alternatives for our overall business objectives.”
“It’s certainly an interesting moment in time,” said Feo. “Some of our products and services that we announced days prior [to the closure] coincidentally aligned with areas where they were stepping out of the market that we were stepping into — particularly around data management and third-party onboarding. That’s a growth opportunity for us. There’s 50 to 100 companies in the market that needed a transitional solution and there’s only a handful of places to go.”
The downside for Experian is that Oracle Advertising was also a sizeable customer.
“We’ve won a dozen or so customers that were historically utilizing some components of Oracle’s stack,” said Feo. “But there are hundreds that are looking for alternative solutions, given the abruptness of the announcement.”
Two roads diverged
Experian’s offerings fall primarily under two headings, Consumer Sync and Consumer View. “On the Consumer Sync side, we offer a few identity products,” said Feo. “We offer an offline identity graph, an online identity graph and some data collection functionality.” Experian is interoperable with third-party identifiers like UID 2.0 and RampID. “We provide an identity graph that allows those identifiers to be associated with any digital IDs that represent a household or a user.”
Consumer View combines attribute data for persons and households with the high-level view of audiences. “We still support cookies throughout our products and services where applicable, but by no means are we dependent on them.” Experian is also integrated with a number of the major data clean rooms.
GumGum, also in the market for former Oracle customers, has an offering that could hardly be more different. “What we focus on,” Hulst explained, “is not necessarily who the person is but what environments your consumers are engaging in from a content and consumption standpoint.” GumGum helps brands identify content that resonates with existing, as well as prospective, consumers. In other words, it provides contextual intelligence.
“All of that is without the use of cookies, without the use of personal identifiers,” Hulst emphasized. “We are a leader in contextual, we have advanced contextual technology, but the other thing we’ve focused on more recently is the intersection of context with how much of the consumer’s attention you are receiving at any one point in that particular context.”
Ex-Oracle Advertising customers, then, can choose between at least two routes to customer engagement. Using a range of techniques to continue identifying consumers without infringing their privacy (identifiers, ID graphs, data clean rooms); or abandoning identity in favor of understanding resonant context and content. Or maybe a combination of the two (and of course Experian and GumGum are only two among many adtech vendors responding to the challenge).
Overall, Hulst believes, marketers are looking for new ways to engage with consumers. There’s a growing focus on first-party data and an interest in finding more privacy-friendly ways of connecting. “Third-party data was something we had had as an industry for a while; with cookies going away, folks were looking for new solutions,” she said. That’s a positive thing, she concluded.
The post What Oracle’s exit from advertising means for the adtech space appeared first on MarTech.
**The Impact of Oracle’s Departure from Advertising on the Adtech Industry**
In recent years, the advertising technology (adtech) industry has experienced significant shifts as major players have entered and exited the market. One of the most notable developments in this space is Oracle’s decision to scale back its involvement in the advertising sector. Oracle, a global leader in cloud computing and enterprise software, had previously made significant investments in adtech, but its departure from the advertising business has sent ripples throughout the industry. This article explores the reasons behind Oracle’s exit, its impact on the adtech ecosystem, and the broader implications for the future of digital advertising.
### Oracle’s Foray into Adtech: A Brief Overview
Oracle’s journey into the adtech space began in earnest with a series of high-profile acquisitions. In 2014, Oracle acquired BlueKai, a data management platform (DMP), for approximately $400 million. BlueKai was known for its ability to collect and analyze vast amounts of consumer data, which allowed advertisers to target specific audiences more effectively. This acquisition was followed by Oracle’s purchase of other adtech companies, including Datalogix, Moat, and Grapeshot, further solidifying its presence in the digital advertising ecosystem.
Oracle’s strategy was clear: leverage its expertise in data management and cloud computing to create a robust advertising platform that could compete with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon. By integrating these adtech assets into its Oracle Data Cloud (ODC), the company aimed to provide marketers with a comprehensive suite of tools for audience targeting, measurement, and analytics.
### The Decision to Exit: Why Oracle Pulled Back from Adtech
Despite its initial enthusiasm, Oracle’s foray into the adtech world did not yield the expected results. Several factors contributed to the company’s decision to scale back its advertising operations:
1. **Increased Regulatory Scrutiny**: The rise of data privacy regulations, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), significantly impacted the adtech industry. These regulations placed strict limitations on the collection and use of consumer data, which was a core component of Oracle’s adtech offerings. As a result, Oracle faced challenges in maintaining compliance while continuing to provide value to advertisers.
2. **Shift in Market Dynamics**: The digital advertising landscape has become increasingly dominated by a few major players, often referred to as the “walled gardens” — Google, Facebook, and Amazon. These companies control vast amounts of first-party data and have built closed ecosystems that are difficult for third-party adtech providers to penetrate. Oracle, which relied heavily on third-party data, found it challenging to compete in this environment.
3. **Internal Strategic Priorities**: Oracle’s core business has always been in enterprise software and cloud computing. As the company continued to focus on its cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, the advertising business became less of a strategic priority. In 2020, Oracle announced that it would be winding down its Oracle Data Cloud division, signaling its intent to exit the adtech space.
4. **Financial Performance**: Oracle’s adtech ventures, while promising, did not generate the level of revenue or profitability that the company had hoped for. The adtech market is highly competitive, with slim margins and constant innovation required to stay ahead. Oracle’s advertising business struggled to achieve the scale necessary to compete with the industry’s giants, leading to diminishing returns on its investments.
### The Ripple Effect: Impact on the Adtech Industry
Oracle’s departure from the advertising business has had a significant impact on the adtech ecosystem, affecting various stakeholders, including advertisers, publishers, and other adtech companies.
1. **Disruption for Advertisers**: Oracle’s exit left many advertisers who relied on its data management and targeting solutions in a difficult position. Brands that had built their advertising strategies around Oracle’s tools were forced to seek alternative providers. This disruption created opportunities for other adtech companies to step in and fill the void, but it also highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on a single vendor for critical advertising infrastructure.
2. **Consolidation in the Adtech Space**: Oracle’s exit is part of a broader trend of consolidation in the adtech industry. As regulatory pressures and market dynamics make it harder for smaller players to compete, many adtech companies have either exited the market or been acquired by larger firms. Oracle’s decision to step back has accelerated this trend, as other companies look to acquire its former clients and technology assets.
3. **Increased Focus on First-Party Data**: One of the key challenges that Oracle faced was its reliance on third-party data, which has become increasingly difficult to use due to privacy regulations and the phasing out of third-party cookies. In response, the adtech industry has shifted its focus toward first-party data — information that companies collect directly from their customers. Oracle’s
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