The rise, stall and fall of Oracle’s advertising business

It’s a sober end for a business that ex-staffers, industry experts and former competitors describe as an ambitious, well-resourced organization with a collegiate internal culture — in the beginning, at least. But as the founding executives of its acquired businesses left, ex-staffers say culture gave way to corporate distance, innovation slowed and growth avenues closed up.

‘The first people you would call‘

At first, Oracle’s plan was clear. Online advertising was exploding and the software giant wanted a piece of the action. It started with acquisitions: Vitrue and Eloqua in 2012, followed by Datalogix and BlueKai in 2014, AddThis in 2016, Moat in 2017, and finally Grapeshot in 2018. Oracle was buying its way into the booming ad tech world, one deal at a time.

To clients, deep-pocketed Oracle seemed to be building one of the most compelling new players in advertising.

“They positioned themselves as everything to everyone,” said Andrew Sandoval, vp of biddable media at digital media agency Croud. During a stint at MDC (now Stagwell) shop Media Kitchen as it was building out a programmatic trading desk, he said Oracle was a supplier that the company considered working with.

Data management platform (DMP) BlueKai was “ubiquitous” in the sector, he recalled, while the team at Datalogix, which offered data and measurement services, soon became “the first people you would call.”

‘Like a moonshot that came true‘

It wasn’t just businesses that were impressed by Oracle. Founders and ad tech talent were equally eager to be a part of its growing empire.

One example was Grapeshot, co-founded by entrepreneur John Snyder and Martin Porter, a Cambridge University mathematician. 

“John [Snyder] would say to me: ‘We need to find the Oracles of the world.’ It’s funny he put it that way. It was like a moonshot that came true,” recalled Jan Zlotnick, who was hired as Grapeshot’s creative director in 2017.

The May 2018 acquisition initially brought “general excitement and happiness” to the Grapeshot team, said one staffer, who spoke on the condition on anonymity.

But once the business was swallowed by Oracle — bureaucratic and remote, compared to the simplicity of start-up life — employees became uncertain about their place, former staffers recall. 

In an effort to get Bluekai, Grapeshot and Moat functioning in concert, Oracle restructured its ad tech sales teams three times that year, a former employee said. And by the end of 2018, Grapeshot had shed approximately 25 of its staff through layoffs and resignations. 

“I was a naive, optimistic, young ad tech person, hoping to stick around and be part of Oracle,” remembers one of those made redundant.

Though one of Oracle’s final ad tech buys, Grapeshot’s trajectory from promising scale-up to scuttled potential offers a perspective on the tech company’s ambitions and changing priorities.

The years between 2018 and 2021 brought major changes including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, Google’s drawn-out attempt at cookie deprecation, and a policy change at Meta (then still just Facebook) that prevented data sharing with third parties, including Oracle’s ad business.

Oracle tried to pivot accordingly. Grapeshot and Moat were intended to help shore up its business as the ad industry began to move beyond third-party cookies. But that same transition spelled trouble for BlueKai and AddThis, which were left floundering in the new privacy-focused era.

“I was there when GDPR was announced,” recalled one former staffer. “The drop off in revenue was significant. The Bluekai platform lost about 85% of revenue in Europe overnight. The atmosphere was quite tense.”

By 2020, faced with sizable penalties from the European Union — a GDPR breach by Oracle could have brought a fine equal to 4% of its global revenues to its door — the firm ended up pulling its third party data services out of Europe entirely, and shuttered AddThis. 

At the same time, marketers were becoming more focused on privacy and data provenance. In hindsight, industry experts say Oracle was poorly positioned to address those concerns.

Piece by piece, Oracle’s future started looking less like a prophecy and more like a pipe dream. And by 2021, the founders of Grapeshot, Moat and Bluekai had each moved on. 

One former Oracle employee described how the advertising business’ status within the cloud giant began to slip — and with it, strategic support. Budgets set aside for international teams to travel to the U.S. — something the staffer said contributed to a positive internal culture — gradually “faded out.”

“It was an ongoing fight to prove our worth and get the resources we needed. We were still pushing in the market,” they said. “But so was our competition.”

In 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising’s revenues had dropped from $2 billion to $200 million — hardly pocket change, but a poor return for a company of Oracle’s size.

‘The summer of Oracle’

When the end came, it came quickly. A brief announcement in its June Q4 earnings call was the first its clients — and many staff — heard about the closure. Oracle told its own suppliers it would end licensing agreements by July 1st.

Michelle Hulst was svp, strategic partnerships & business development at Datalogix, and a group vp at Oracle Data Cloud until 2020. The ad business’ closure was “disappointing,” she told Digiday in an email. 

Now president of contextual adtech firm GumGum, Hulst hopes to benefit from the exit. “The shutdown of Oracle Advertising may close one door, but it opens several others for innovation and progress in advertising,” she added.

Competitors such as DoubleVerify and IAS have also moved to quarry Oracle’s former clients and talent. 

“We’ve been having conversations in helping the brands who were affected manage consistency,” said Nick Reid, EMEA managing director of DoubleVerify, without sharing the number of new clients or staffers the company had picked up.

“You hate to see people impacted, but it’s good for business,” said Mario Diez, CEO of contextual advertising provider Peer39, who also declined to share specific details.

Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of IAS, told Digiday that the last four months had been “the summer of Oracle.” Starting at Cannes Lions, her company had worked to pick off orphaned Oracle clients, such as OpenX. 

It has also hired over 20 former staffers, including Oracle Advertising chief revenue officer Marc Grabowski as its new COO, a move Utzschnieder said had helped IAS capture new customers. Going forward, she wants to set her sights beyond its enterprise-level clientele. “Oracle also had a decent size mid tier business. I think there’s opportunity there,” she said.

Three months after announcing its departure from the ad industry, Oracle CTO and co-founder Larry Ellison and CEO Safra Katz spoke once again to analysts to discuss the firm’s latest results.

Ellison’s attention was on tech’s current fixation: AI, and the demand for Oracle’s data centers that it would surely bring. Save for a brief comment from Katz, who said the ad business exit reduced Oracle’s $5.6 billion cloud app revenues by 2%, Oracle Advertising’s demise (or the fate of its 900 execs) didn’t register.

This isn’t the first time a tech giant has bought and then bungled a foothold in the ad  industry. Verizon’s Oath-breaking AOL and Yahoo debacle, or AT&T’s hot-potato sale of AppNexus to Microsoft both provide case studies.

In the end, advertising was clearly just a flirtation for Oracle, a side-venture easily discarded once the honeymoon faded.

Oracle did not respond to requests for comment for this story.