There are many puzzling aspects to Oracle's choice to shrink its advertising business, but the fact that competitors are scrambling to fill the void isn't one of them.
The race escalated last week when it emerged that Oracle's advertising division would not survive the acquisition.
That left advertisers, publishers and ad tech vendors scrambling to find alternatives, sparking a swift (but muted) response from many companies.
Who can blame them? It's opportunistic, sure, but Oracle's advertising business made $300 million in profits last fiscal year, and few ad tech executives would turn up their noses at even a fraction of that, especially in today's tough market.
“There's a lot of migration,” said Mario Diez, CEO of contextual advertising business Peer39. “There's a lot of movement from advertisers wanting continuity, and they need to be able to easily make that same transition between their platforms of choice.”
Colleagues at GumGum share the same view.
“We've seen a surge in inquiries from advertisers over the past few weeks,” said Adam Schenkel, executive vice president of global platform strategy and operations at GumGum. “Over the past few months, more than 300 advertisers have started using our Verity solution for pre-bid contextual and brand suitability targeting, and that growth has continued over the past week.”
They're talking about contextual targeting, but they're also talking about other parts of Oracle's ad business: Grapeshot, Moat, data management and optimization, and as Oracle's ad empire crumbles, there's a fierce race to replace those services without disrupting campaigns too much.
But no matter how intense the unrest becomes, its effects are unlikely to last long, at least until the end of September.
At that point, Oracle will shut down all of its advertising products, giving customers a decision in weeks that typically takes months.
Some will take a moment to pause and think about what they want from their partners going forward, while others will jump straight into the quickest and easiest option: a breakup. Oracle's rivals already appear to be weighing alternatives to Oracle. They are pitching themselves as either facilitators of continuity or agents of change.
GumGum clearly falls into the latter camp.
“Following Oracle's announcement, much of the messaging from vendors currently in the market is focused on helping marketers transition and replicate what they were doing with Grapeshot elsewhere, and this is a consistent message we're seeing in the market,” said Pete Wallace, general manager EMEA at GumGum. “We're encouraging brands to use this transition as an opportunity to reassess, iterate and improve on what they were doing in the past.”
Whether desperate or smart, these decisions are being made under pressure right now: marketers must identify potential partners, test them, put them through sourcing rigor, and then race against the clock to get them on board.
And they’re doing all of this without the help of Oracle’s existing ad executives, most of whom are due to be let go by the end of this month. Given the size of these deals, tensions are especially high on the ad verification side, but switching contextual ad providers is no easy task.
“Eight years ago, finding a contextual advertising partner was probably more relationship-based,” Schenkel said. “Now it's gone a lot deeper. More marketers are being more thoughtful about what technology can and can't do and whether it will help them achieve their goals.”
Whether they'll have enough impact to disrupt the market status quo remains to be seen. There's a reason DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science are in the lead, and at least the latter is poised to be the biggest winner in Oracle's collapse. They've already been approaching advertising executives looking for new vendors.
Nick Reid, managing director of DoubleVerify's EMEA business, said in an emailed statement: “Given recent market changes, we see an opportunity to address advertisers' evolving needs with comprehensive solutions across context, brand safety, suitability, fraud and viewability. We are actively working with advertisers and partners to ensure uninterrupted measurement, providing continuity, transparency and confidence in our clients' digital investments. As an established global provider of comprehensive media quality and performance solutions, we are uniquely positioned to help our clients navigate market challenges and maximise return on their advertising spend.”
Advertisers aren't the only ones caught up in this whirlwind.
Publisher ad ops executives are also scratching their heads: They used Oracle's Grapeshot technology to curate private marketplaces for programmatic inventory and ensure the inventory was safe for advertisers. All of that, and the tagging and back-end fraud that comes with it, will be hard to replace.
That has Oracle Advertising's rivals gunning for many of the company's former executives, as they are considered some of the best in the business and well-positioned to help fill the void with a firm grasp on exactly how publishers and advertisers use the technology.
“We've reached out to about 100 people to see if we can help them get a soft landing, either here or somewhere else,” said Diez of Peer39.
Needless to say, the next few weeks will be full of twists and turns. Where will they end up? None of the advertising executives Digiday spoke to had any idea.
The suddenness of Oracle's decision meant they had no choice but to expect the unexpected, meaning they've been playing catch-up since this whole debacle began. Oracle Advertising's partners were caught off guard by the company's plans to shut down its advertising division. One executive even noted that Oracle Advertising executives had met to discuss onboarding existing customers a week before the June 11 shutdown announcement.
“Products like Moat [a marketplace]”It's hard to build a product at that scale, so it certainly leaves a big hole in the market,” says Rocky Moss, CEO of ad measurement company DeepSee.io. “You can launch a tag-based tracking product that seemingly has much better capabilities than existing market players, but if you don't have the same volume or coverage, it's probably going to be terrible in comparison.”
All anyone can do now is speculate on how the fallout from Oracle's collapse will impact the market.
There will likely be more competition, especially when it comes to ad verification.
“On the buy side, I'm not sure marketers and agencies are comfortable with DoubleVerify and IAS being the only two competitors,” said Scott Cunningham of Cunningham Tech Consulting, president of the Publishers Council at the Brand Safety Institute. “It feels like the market is ripe for others to enter.”
Only time will tell if he's right. In the meantime, there will likely be a period of uncertainty and turmoil as players compete for positions.
