• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, April 19, 2017

Cloud platform and application-services firm Oracle has signed a deal to acquire Moat, an independent third-party measurement and tracking company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Moat measures digital ads on Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat, among other platforms.The companies said Moat will remain an independent platform within the Oracle Data Cloud, and Moat’s founder and CEO Jonah Goodhart will remain to run the division within Oracle.

The move is the latest in a string of M&A activity in the ad-tech and martech sectors.

Marketers have been increasingly turning to martech powerhouses to get help in understanding their first-party data and seek more transparency for digital advertising. Oracle acquired DataLogix, an ad targeting data firm, and Blue Kai, a data management software firm, in 2014. Oracle rival Adobe acquired TubeMogul last November, and Salesforce bought Krux in October.

“With the Moat acquisition, Oracle Data Cloud now offers brands and publishers a full suite of targeting and measurement solutions to improve the outcome of virtually every type of digital advertising campaign,” stated Eric Roza, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Data Cloud.

Ad-tech executives weighed in on the acquisition. “This acquisition reaffirms the value of data, measurement and analytics in our industry,” Scott Knoll, CEO, Integral Ad Science, told Real-Time Daily via email.

Jay Friedman, COO, Goodway Group, noted: “This gives Oracle a pervasive pixel on all impression -- well, not all, but on all of Moat’s clients’ impressions. Oracle had that at times through Datalogix, if there was a concerted measurement effort, but this gives Oracle the two-sided view: one from the publishers they collect the data from, and one from the advertisers that are buying that data.”

Friedman adds the deal will enable Oracle to “get much smarter about who is using its data, who could use more, and where advertisers are getting users they wanted anyway, without paying for the data.”

"Like the Adobe/Tubemogul transaction, the Oracle/Moat transaction is another example of convergence between marketing technology and advertising technology stacks. Marketers want software that helps them manage the entire customer acquisition journey, which includes both marketing and advertising, and vendors are piecing together point solutions to give CMOs the tools they need," said Tod Loofbourrow, CEO, ViralGains.