Adweek published a perspective on why Oracle Advertising is shutting down, which unintentionally underscored why Adland is shutting down—and why most White advertising agencies are in trouble too.
The self-promoting author typed roughly 750 words on Oracle Advertising with only a single use of the word ‘creative’—and as a qualifier for strategies. But there are plenty of references to platforms, cookies, measurement, tracking, targeting, activation, analytics, and modern data stacks.
In short, advertising today has little to do with creativity in the form of layouts and storyboards—and lots to do with PowerPoint decks and Excel spreadsheets.
Oh, and don’t expect any modern data stack to address true diversity in Adland—rather, there is endless data proving the persistent prevalence of systemic racism.
Why Oracle Advertising Is Really Shutting Down
Here’s a breakdown of what went wrong and how to rebuild successfully
By Zach Van Doren
Oracle Advertising’s recent news that it’s shuttering its business is a notable milestone in the ongoing disruption and transformation of adtech and martech. Despite its many acquisitions, Oracle failed to integrate these pieces into a marketing cloud stack that worked at a level that could compete with the likes of Adobe or Salesforce.
Oracle faced a few core challenges: its reliance on third-party cookies and tracking without proper consent, losing its data sharing agreement with Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and dealing with tightening security and privacy restrictions across the industry such as GDPR. This all hindered Oracle Advertising’s adoption and revenue streams, rendering Oracle BlueKai DMP obsolete.
But there’s a deeper cause for Oracle Advertising’s failure—the growing trend of brands centralizing data into a data lake like Snowflake, Databricks, Teradata VantageCloud or Amazon Redshift to unify intelligence and activation, rather than keeping customer data scattered across platforms and relying on third-party cookies. Brands are done with silos and redundancies in their IP. Instead, they’re looking for unified customer data storage and streamlined intelligence across identity resolution, audiences, orchestration, modeling, and measurement—for less reliance on a dying framework and more flexibility to thrive in a new advertising future.
Deconstructing Oracle Advertising and rebuilding a modern data stack
So what now? Oracle will shut off access to all tools in the Oracle Advertising Suite by September 30th, 2024. Customers have reported the vast majority of Oracle Advertising employees have been let go and that customer support functions have been taken over by off-shore contractors.
While Oracle Advertising’s end-of-life may present some challenges to brands who are currently using the product, it presents a bigger opportunity to build a smarter advertising strategy, with a foundation built on first-party data.
Audience management
With Oracle Advertising, brands uploaded their customer data into the platform for organization, segmentation and activation. They used Oracle BlueKai DMP to create audiences with third-party cookies, which are soon to be deprecated.
In a modern data stack, brands can now access licensable data within their data warehouse, allowing for easy segmentation and activation. Measurement and workflows are seamlessly integrated with connected business intelligence and analytics tools.
Audience and identity enrichment
With Oracle Advertising, brands enriched their first-party data by matching it with third-party data from available marketplaces, creating audience segments that blended behavioral, demographic and other data.
In a modern data stack, first-party data is enhanced with partner data for optimized paid media reach and better performance through precise segmentation and modeling. Using a robust ecosystem and data partners like TransUnion, Acxiom and Merkle, first-party data is activated through a customer data platform (CDP) with data from the data warehouse.
Activation
Using tools within the Oracle Advertising Suite, brands created segments that were exported to paid media platforms for ad targeting, relying on third-party data—a method now becoming ineffective. Brands could alternatively use a media onboarder like LiveRamp, but this approach leads to workflow inefficiencies as well as expensive and dynamic costs.
In a modern data stack, activation is direct. By using a data warehouse with a CDP, brands can manage profile attributes, audience segmentation and journey orchestration across paid, owned, digital and offline channels. This approach offers more flexibility, allowing brands to interoperate across identity spaces and activate data directly with partners and walled gardens.
Measurement
With Oracle Advertising, brands could verify they were serving ads to real people and not bots, ensuring brand safety, and measure ad views, clicks and post-click behaviors to improve audience targeting, channels and creative strategies.
In a modern data stack, verification is handled by established players like Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify. By centralizing data in a warehouse that connects to audience and orchestration functions, brands can manage behaviors using both first- and third-party profiles. The industry is shifting away from third-party cookie-based measurement, so brands should now centralize user and audience data in a data warehouse, utilizing analytics, measurement and marketing mix modeling or multi-touch attribution for comprehensive measurement.
A major shift means it’s time to reassess
Oracle’s decision to sunset the Oracle Advertising Suite marks a significant shift in the industry landscape. As businesses navigate these changes, it’s crucial to reassess their digital strategy and consider alternative solutions that align with evolving market dynamics. Whether leveraging emerging technologies or migrating to robust, future-proof platforms, organizations must prioritize agility and innovation to stay ahead in an increasingly competitive market.
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