As September drew to a close, so did Oracle Advertising. The exit from the advertising business had been suddenly 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 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 like a good time to look back on these 10 years – and look ahead too.
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A bittersweet end to the chapter
Michelle Hulst was involved from the beginning. She spent over nine years helping Datalogix grow, joined Oracle with the acquisition, and spent another five and a half years with Oracle’s advertising business. She is now the CEO of the contextual first ad platform GumGum.
“I was involved from the very beginning when we built Datalogix,” she said. “We were acquired by Oracle shortly after BlueKai was acquired. Then I was instrumental, as were other people on the management team with me, in the acquisitions of companies like Moat and Grapeshot, AddThis, Crosswise, a whole host of them. Every one of those companies was a great company in its own right. It’s bittersweet when the end of a chapter closes. But I’m excited about how people, when Oracle Advertising closes, will continue to contribute to the industry.”
Did the closure come as a shock to Hulst? “I think it was surprising to a lot of people in the industry,” Hulst said, “because it was a pretty abrupt announcement. But Oracle is a big company with a lot of different areas of focus, and I think the advertising business wasn’t as central as some of their other activities.”
Chris Feo, business manager at Experian Marketing Services, described it as a partial surprise. “There were definitely some signs of disruption,” he said, referring to management changes in particular, “but a complete closing of the doors was not what the market had expected by any means.”
Had Oracle’s advertising model, built primarily around a DMP, become old fashioned? “Not necessarily,” Feo said, stressing that components of Oracle’s ad stack such as Grapeshot and Moat had continued potential for growth. “General data marketplaces – the old DMP business – where it’s evolved are data marketplaces that are built into many of the [ad] buying platforms instead of stand-alone solutions. LiveRamp Data Marketplace and others, they are still healthy, growing companies.”
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Oracle’s decision means opportunities for adtech
Of course, one consequence of the shutdown is that many 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 required a forcing function to make a change. With Oracle’s shutdown—and many of the current ways clients use data to reach their consumers gone—they are now in the process of looking for new ways. Sometimes these compelling features force us to seek alternatives that may be better options for our overall business goals.”
“It’s really an interesting moment in time,” Feo said. “Some of our products and services that we announced days before [to the closure] temporarily in line with areas where they stepped out of the market that we stepped into – particularly around data management and third-party onboarding. It is a growth opportunity for us. There are 50 to 100 companies in the market that needed a transitional solution and there are only a handful of places to go.”
The downside to Experian is that Oracle Advertising was also a significant client.
“We’ve won a dozen or so customers who have historically used certain components of Oracle’s stack,” Feo said. “But there are hundreds looking for alternative solutions, given the abruptness of the announcement.”
Two paths diverged
Experian’s offerings fall primarily under two headings, Consumer Sync and Consumer View. “On the Consumer Sync side, we offer some identity products,” Feo said. “We offer an offline identity graph, an online identity graph, and some data collection functionality.” Experian is interoperable with third-party identifiers such as UID 2.0 and RampID. “We provide an identity graph that allows these identifiers to be associated with any digital ID that represents a household or user.”
Consumer View combines attribute data for people and households with a high-level view of audiences. “We still support cookies in all our products and services where applicable, but we are in no way dependent on them.” Experian is also integrated with a number of the larger data rooms.
GumGum, also in the market for former Oracle customers, has an offering that could hardly be more different. “What we focus on,” explained Hulst, “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 potential, consumers. In other words, it provides contextual intelligence.
“All of this is without the use of cookies, without the use of personal identifiers,” Hulst emphasized. “We’re a leader in contextual, we have advanced contextual technology, but the other thing we’ve focused on recently is the intersection of context and how much of the consumer’s attention you get at any point in that particular context.”
Ex-Oracle Advertising customers can thus choose between at least two paths to customer engagement. Use a variety of technologies to continue to identify consumers without compromising their privacy (identifiers, ID graphs, data rooms); or to abandon identity in favor of understanding resonant context and content. Or perhaps a combination of the two (and of course Experian and GumGum are just two of many adtech vendors responding to the challenge).
Overall, Hulst believes, marketers are looking for new ways to engage with consumers. There is a growing focus on first-party data and an interest in finding more privacy-friendly ways to connect. “Third-party data was something we’d had as an industry for a while; When cookies disappeared, people looked for new solutions,” she said. It is positive, she concluded.
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