• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 22, 2014

Oracle planted a firm stake in online advertising Monday with the acquisition of audience-targeting firm Datalogix, which will remain an independent company after the deal closes. The deal, which gives greater support to the Oracle Data Cloud, should build much stronger relationships with brands, as well as tech companies like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter. The terms were not disclosed.

Brands and retailers in 2015 will continually move to refine the connection between offline and online data. Earlier this year, Oracle delivered on a promise to improve targeting through data and connect offline data with online. The company launched an automated audience lookalike modeling feature in its marketing cloud offering with technology gained from the company's BlueKai acquisition. The feature works with data characteristics stored in the brand's management platform.

Offline consumer data is incredibly valuable because businesses are still trying to figure out the indirect and longer-term effects of online advertising," per Yory Wurmser, analyst at eMarketer. "This would give Oracle an even richer set of data to work with in bridging their CRM capabilities and promising better ad targeting and messaging and better analytics."

The Datalogix acquisition will allow Oracle to reinforce relationships with some of the biggest tech giants supporting real-time ad targeting across the Web. At the most resent MediaPost Search Insider Summit, Resolution Media Chief Strategy Officer Gerry Bavaro mentioned integrating data from companies like Datalogix, which he said represents more than 40 million people with loyalty cards, into real-time people-based ad-targeting platforms. He said Google will likely look to roll out people-based targeting, the equivalent of Facebook Atlas, which enables the social site to match a Facebook ID to other data from a company like Datalogix. Positively a plus for Oracle as it connects its Data Cloud services to enterprise platform like inventory and data management systems for retailers.

"All major media companies use Datalogix data to understand the offline sales lift of their online advertising," Wurmser said. "As major players such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, design and build their own custom databases and analytics platforms, Oracle is losing influence. This purchase re-establishes Oracle's importance to these companies. Basically, in the past, Oracle ran a lot of the hardware and software that made the internet run. With this purchase, it’s buying some of the key data that makes Internet advertising run."

With 93% of purchases occurring offline, per Wurmser, a large part of the influence of online advertising occurs beyond the view of online publishers and ad networks. To create accurate attribution and analytics for online ads, these media companies need offline data that they can tie together with their online ads. That’s what Datalogix does. It tracks offline purchases by individuals via loyalty programs and puts it into a linkable format. Datalogix in effect, closes the loop between online media and offline sales, he said.

Datalogix said in a release that it currently serves more than 650 customers, such as some of the major U.S. advertisers and digital media publishers.