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When the news dropped that Oracle would acquire Moat, DataXu CEO Mike Baker’s first thought was not that Oracle had made a big move in measurement, but that it had bought a piece of the walled garden action.
“At some level you can look at that deal and think, Oracle Data Cloud is buying growth,” Baker says in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. “And where is that growth coming from? It’s coming from the rulers – Google and Facebook – and the opening up of measurement in those walled gardens.”
Baker says Moat and its chief competitors, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, have technology parity (disclosure: He’s an investor in IAS), but he credits Moat with expanding the category through business model innovation and strong product marketing.
“They sort of have gone into quality metrics and deepened the concept from pure validation to qualitative scoring,” he said. “Measurement has turned out to be a big business, much bigger than I would’ve guessed five years ago.”
Also in this episode: an update on DataXu’s business, the recent wave of advertiser boycotts and guessing at the “end state” programmatic services model.
