What Oracle’s exit from advertising means for the adtech space

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.”

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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.