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 their 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: their reliance on third-party cookies and tracking without proper consent, losing their 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.