Oracle’s aggressive stance on acquisition is evident when you consider its Marketing Cloud shopping spree, and it’s not backing down.
It recently added web personalization platform Maxymiser to a long list of purchases that included data-management platform BlueKai, campaign-management tool Responsys and Datalogix.
The intent is to round out a complete stack that covers all channels of interest to a CMO, said Oracle Marketing Cloud SVP and GM Kevin Akeroyd.
Marketers don’t want a bunch of point solutions, he told AdExchanger at DMEXCO in Germany: “They want simplification, better integration. They want to drive revenue and customer experience and effectiveness.”
Another undertaking is stitching an identity graph it hopes proves useful for cross-platform attribution in a world of walled gardens. The company first alluded to the ID graph in April, but Oracle is exploring more ways to connect identities across known user databases like CRM, digital channels like mobile and social and the media activation layer.
Akeroyd spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: First, why did Oracle buy Maxymiser?
KEVIN AKEROYD: We’re very strong in email, SMS, push, landing page optimization, social, a whole bunch of digital channels, but not so strong on the actual website itself. Web, mobile web and mobile apps was something we did not have a big footprint in. If we wanted to be the platform for an omnichannel world, an absence in web, mobile web and mobile apps didn’t make sense. We filled a tactical hole in one of the most important channels.
Does this indicate you’re getting more into mobile?
Strategically, we’ve seen the movement from the marketer using dozens if not hundreds of individual apps for individual point solutions. We’ll start to shift more toward an enterprise marketing platform where the CMO doesn’t have to have one solution for web, one for push, one for email, one for loyalty, one for mobile. There is so much efficiency, time, speed, resources to be had by streamlining that and giving the CMO and all the advertising/demand-gen/ecommerce people who work for the CMO, one platform that does all of the above.
How does your Maximyser acquisition mesh with Oracle’s commerce business?
Oracle already has BlueKai, which is one of the leading DMPs for ecommerce players. Responsys far and away is the leading omnichannel campaign management for ecommerce players. ATG/Oracle Commerce is one of the undisputed leaders in ecommerce technology and we have Micros for point of sale commerce.
Now you add Maximyser, and a huge part of its customer base happens to be omnichannel commerce companies. We are as committed to integrations with other business groups that do not live inside the Marketing Cloud as those internally. As an example, one year after finishing up our ownership of Responsys, we announced a really exciting integration between Oracle commerce and the Marketing Cloud because campaign management was critical to both clouds.
Can we talk about the Oracle DMP? You’re forging more TV deals, such as with Hulu’s private exchange. What’s the future for Oracle and TV?
TV is going to be a very important, emerging part of the landscape. The addressable, set top box with a unique ID is very nascent at this point. That hasn’t exploded into billions of billions of unique IDs attached to a set top box. Will it soon? Emphatically yes. And then that ID pool, along with mobile IDs, device IDS, cookie IDS, email IDs, will become a very important part of the DMP landscape.
What’s Oracle’s role in unifying these disparate IDs?
You’ve got all these one-off IDs – that’s video/TV ID, search ID and social ID – and there’s a lot of effort to scale the power of that ID within your own walled garden. But the goal of these platforms is to optimize your spend as a marketer on their network. So you’ll use my ID, data and analytics and I’ll report on my own self to tell you how I’m doing.This closed-garden issue is going to be a real threat to the marketer, who will need a more universal ID that goes across these closed-garden IDs, be it video or TV, social, mobile, as well as across the open web.
So Oracle will facilitate that universal ID?
We’re in the position to be that in the marketplace. When we talk again in a year, it will probably be one of the things I talk about most. These closed gardens –Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple – they will be big and strong but they’re optimized on spend for themselves, not across each of them or the open web. Marketers don’t want to rely on a platform to measure that’s beholden to selling you media on its own network. We think that’s going to be us.
How has the Oracle DMP evolved?
It is driving multichannel personalization, nurturing, loyalty, ecommerce, so the DMP is now for the marketing life cycle, not just the advertising world or optimizing display. We’re continuing to push to be the best publisher DMP for media companies who want to monetize ad space, as well as the best marketer DMP. Some companies like Disney are both a marketer and a publisher, but our ability to satisfy both of those rather than most of my competitors who do one or the other, is a very big differentiator.
What’s your DMP sales strategy – are you positioning it as part of the broader stack?
When you put a DMP into our stack, you’re tapping into first-party data. You’re marrying the cookie and mobile pools with addressable email pools in solutions like Eloqua and Responsys and then the postal addresses with Datalogix. Your ability to have an ID graph that maps most major identities instead of just being cookie-based is another huge differentiator.
Because of that, we’re doing the offline, first-party data integrations and our DMP is being extended into the personalization engine for the whole life cycle, not just advertising. It doesn’t mean we don’t compete head-to-head with the publisher guys, but when I go into a large company like a telco or financial services company with huge B2B use cases and B2C use cases, because I have Eloqua and Responsys, we’re usually the only ones who can satisfy both those needs.
