In 2014, Oracle acquired Datalogix and BlueKai.
In 2016, Oracle acquired AddThis.
In 2017, Oracle acquired Moat.
In 2018, Oracle acquired Grapeshot.
In 2024, Oracle is shutting down their entire advertising business after posting an 85% reduction in revenue from 2022 to 2024 ($2B to $300M) and spending over $4B in acquisitions over a decade.
The news of a tech giant (the 77th largest company in the world according to Forbes) is an indicator that the impact of privacy regulations is absolutely massive. Oracle’s rooted their advertising stack in cookie-based targeting, and the GDPR shrinkage and impending end of cookies ended up being the death knell for the business.
What does it mean?
We have been talking consistently about how the end of cookies will mean a seismic shift in how the advertising business operates. A shift to publisher-driven buys where content and geography play a much more substantial role than 1:1 targeting. This shut down by Oracle only supports this premise.
When cookies go away, 1:1 targeting at scale will not be feasible. Cookies were ubiquitous – alternative 1:1 IDs like UID2, YahooID, RampID and more are far from ubiquitous. No one outside of the companies selling them knows their true scale, but if the recent push by the Trade Desk to focus on the Top 100 publishers is any indication, the scale isn’t there, and their top list is a lever to gain leverage against publishers.
Cookie-based businesses are far closer to the edge than they may seem, and like a duck floating on water, what may seem like calm on the outside is a furious burst of activity below.
What’s Next?
While predicting the future is a fool’s errand, the expected dominoes that fall from this major news could be sizable. Companies are scrambling to get their post-cookie identity tools in place. When this universal currency disappears, buyers face a whole lot of incomplete solutions and many companies may teeter and fall because of it.
Our recommendation, lean into a more privacy-friendly execution. Move away from 1:1 targeting and embrace a cohort-based solution that leverages privacy-safe means of segmentation.
At Pontiac, we built our ART tool to leverage geography, contextual, and census data for audience segmentation, and we’re seeing better performance than traditional cookie-based targeting. We’ve been able to beat the larger DSPs on CPAs using our meta-data based optimizations.
We’re doing all of this with a future-proof media buying toolset.
The writing is on the wall for companies built on cookie based foundations, and no distributed identity solution will fill the void.
It’s time to get on a different boat because the cookie-based ship is sinking.
