• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, July 17, 2024

I’ve had a lot of time to think about the demise of Oracle Advertising now that a month or so has passed.  Many of my colleagues wrote passionate posts on LinkedIn discussing what they wished Oracle had done right/better/at all.  Interestingly, twice as many people who have literally no firsthand knowledge about the business and the decisions that built it or led to its closing have written diatribes about what could or should have been done.

From my point of view, having been one of the people who helped to build that business originally, there are certainly places to lay blame along the way, but what good does that do?  People are people.  They make mistakes, they take chances, and they move on.  I can name many businesses along the journey of the internet advertising industry that have come and gone, but what I think is more important is to look at the macro conditions that took an incredible vision and ended up with a business that was barely able to survive, and eventually shuttered.

In my opinion, the only thing that could have been done differently with Oracle Advertising -- which was never going to happen -- was for it to own some form of consumer-facing media or ecommerce business. 

The vision for Oracle Advertising was sound.  The business was growing well, even in the face of GDP.  There were strategic decisions made that helped it grow and bolstered its ownership of what could be considered first-party data, which gave it a moat (no pun intended) in the face of rising privacy concerns.   Its expansion into brand safety was great because it gave more tools outside of data and targeting.

Challenges began when more and more stringent views of GDP were implemented across the web, and then Google made its move to shutter the third-party cookie, leaving anyone who was not considered a “walled garden” and who had troves of first-party consumer data, standing outside that (once again, no pun intended) moat which bolstered companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and more.  These folks engaged directly with consumers and therefore had rights to the use of the data, within reason.

Even companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have that direct line to the consumer, and they can use that data accordingly.  There were reports that Oracle Advertising made overtures at one point to buy consumer-facing businesses, but never pulled the trigger, and for good reason.  That’s not what it was set up to do.

Were there other directions it could have gone with the ad-tech and brand-tech tools it owned?   Yes.  Could it have acquired other tools?  Yes.  Could it have sold the pieces for parts or created other partnerships?  Yes.  I assume, with no firsthand knowledge since I haven’t spoken to any decision-makers at Oracle in a long time, they must have weighed the options, realized this conundrum, and felt it better to focus on what they do best.  

Who has the right to criticize Oracle?  How much revenue is it doing, and how much revenue are you and your business doing?  It’s probably bigger than your company, and that should say it all.

I enjoyed my time both before and during Oracle, building something that would become the foundation for most of what we still see today.  When we were acquired by Oracle, I took the tact of “these folks know a lot more than me, just look at the size of their business, so I am going to listen and learn.” I am proud of what we did there, and I am proud of the impact it had on the advertising business of today.

This next wave of the industry Is not so much about the continued separation of media and data.  This stage is about how data can be used to feed the machine that delivers better messages, drives better creativity and ultimately fosters more impactful advertising.  This next wave is going to learn from the last 20 years and apply some combination of creative, AI and strategy to make it better than it ever was, and with the data and insights to prove it.  Maybe it’s a place where Oracle will play, or maybe not.  Unless your business is bigger than theirs, you really don’t have much leverage to criticize them.