Oracle’s decision to shut down its advertising business has created opportunities and challenges for adtech companies and their customers.
As September drew to a close, so did Oracle Advertising. The company abruptly announced its withdrawal from the ad business 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.
Oracle’s advertising history goes back 10 years, beginning with the acquisition of cloud DMP BlueKai and consumer data platform Datalogix. Oracle then brought 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 forward.
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A bittersweet end to the chapter
Michelle Hulst has been there since before the beginning. She spent over nine years helping grow Datalogix, then went to Oracle with the acquisition and spent five-and-a-half years with the Oracle ad business. She’s now President of the contextual-first ad platform GumGum.
“I was there from the beginning when we built Datalogix,” she told us. “We got acquired by Oracle shortly after BlueKai was acquired. Then I was instrumental, along with other folks on the executive team, in the acquisitions of companies like Moat and Grapeshot, AddThis, Crosswise, and 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 surprised many folks in the industry,” Hulst said, “because it was a pretty abrupt announcement. But Oracle is a huge business with many different focus areas, and I think the advertising business was not as front-and-center as some of its other businesses.”
Chris Feo, chief business officer at Experian Marketing Services, described it as a partial surprise. “There was 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.
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“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.”
GumGum has just unveiled a major update that brings its three key offerings together on the new GumGum Platform:
- GumGum Contextual. Self-explanatory.
- GumGum Attention. Using data from an opt-in panel, GumGum tracks the attention being paid to digital ads allowing real-time optimization.
- GumGum Creative. A suite of creative solutions including display ads, video ads, and CTV ads.
“Those had existed as separate offerings up until this point,” Hulst explained. “This pulls those separate offerings together and allows them to interact with each other.”
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).
Update on Experian. Since this article was first published, Experian has announced an initiative in the contextual space. Contextually-Indexed Audiences will combine deterministic audience targeting with contextual targeting. The offering is quite different from GumGum’s, which is essentially agnostic as to website or mobile app visitors identities. Experian will analyze traffic from more than two million websites and apps, resolve the identities of those visitors and map them to Experian’s syndicated audiences. Advertisers can then deliver ads to members of those audiences while they are browsing relevant sites; the advertisers do not need to be concerned with identities, but identities are part of Experian’s recipe for delivering the audiences.
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.
