Oracle is exiting the adtech business after a spectacular two-year decline that saw revenues fall from $US2 billion in 2022 to just $300 million in the last year.

Speaking to analysts on an earnings call yesterday for its most recent results, CEO Safra Catz said: “In Q4, we decided to exit the advertising business, which had declined to about $300 million in revenue in fiscal year 2024.”

Like its traditional business software-as-a-service rivals Adobe and Salesforce, Oracle had a stab at trying to merge the worlds of adtech and martech at the application layer.

With martech acquisitions like Eloqua and Responsys, the vendor matched Salesforce and Adobe in the Australian market. But after merging its martech business with its much larger CX business it seemingly lost focus and dropped off the competitive map - although it still had strong penetration in both B2B and B2C through its installed base.

Oracle's martech business continues in this space.

Adtech is another story, however. Oracle purchased data management platform (DMP) provider, BlueKai in early 2014 for a reported US$350-$400 million. That was dwarfed at year's end with the purchase of Datalogix, reportedly for $1.2 billion. At the time, Datalogix was described as aggregating and providing insights on over $2 trillion in consumer spending from 1,500 data partners across 110 million households to provide purchase-based targeting capabilities. Oracle added to its ad stack with the 2017 purchase of ad measurement platform Moat, which it rolled into its data cloud. It reportedly paid $800 million for Moat.

The BlueKai and Datalogix acquisitions have proven especially troublesome, helping to land the business in hot water after Oracle founder Larry Ellison bragged about having the largest identity graph of people in the world at a conference late last decade. Cue, massive privacy lawsuit.

Oracle perhaps presaged its decision in its submission to the Privacy Review, blasting its competitors, Google and Meta, calling on the Australian Government to go hard on both for their use of data in advertising. Notably, it labelled Google’s business model an "unfair, unrepentant and unrestrained data collection that no reasonable consumer can avoid.”

Then of course Safari’s cookie deprecation and Google’s long-promised and never-yet-delivered deprecation promise to do the same, skewered the growth prospects of the DMP market Oracle was also looking to dominate in.

Ultimately, the quest by the leading martech vendors to unify advertising and marketing technology failed.

Lucky Phil

A few days before Marketo founder Phil Fernandez sold his company to Adobe in September 2018, he told this reporter his rivals were crazy for thinking they could cross the streams. According to Fernandez, adtech was boiling away to effectively just two giant providers - Facebook (now Meta) and Google (now Alphabet).

Just as importantly, the business models were so different - as was the client mindset that “madtech” was always a pipe dream.

Oracle told Australia's regulators its advertising business was merely 'a rounding error.' This morning, it's not even that.

- Additional reporting by Andrew Birmingham.