In A Year Of Data Disruption, Oracle Places Its Bets

Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Oracle has bought lots of stuff. The company’s run of acquisitions of the past several years (BlueKai, Datalogix, AddThis, Crosswise, Grapeshot, Moat and others) remains one of the wildest ad tech M&A sprees in memory, rivaling AOL under Tim Armstrong and Google circa 2006-2011 (DoubleClick, Invite Media, Admeld).

So, how many of Oracle’s once shiny toys are still in use? All of them, according to EVP Rob Tarkoff, Oracle’s guy in charge of Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud.

“All of the acquisitions that we’ve done in the Oracle Data Cloud are contributing to the solutions that we’re building today. While there may have been elements of BlueKai and Datalogix that were based on third-party cookie sync technology, there also are elements that are not,” according to Tarkoff.

Those examples include the company’s registration-based and mobile-based identification models, which Oracle is exploring how to turn into its own product.

“Our identity graph was always something at Oracle Data Cloud that we really just used to power our audiences,” Tarkoff says. “We never thought of it as an independent offering. As the world around identity is so rapidly changing, we’re realizing we have some hidden gems that don’t rely on cookie-based identifiers. Within that are contributions from our BlueKai acquisitions, contributions from Crosswise and other elements that are helping us think about how to build an identity spine that’s useful in what is increasingly a first-party addressable world. We’re using a lot of ad tech to help fuel that transition.”

Also in this episode: the new contextual, CDP mania, COVID silver linings.

Tagged in:

Oracle

Rob Tarkoff

Must Read

Marketers

For Super Bowl First-Timers Manscaped And Ro, Performance Means Changing Perception

For Manscaped and Ro, the Big Game is about more than just flash and exposure. It’s about shifting how audiences perceive their brands.

Marketers

Alphabet Can Outgrow Everything Else, But Can It Outgrow Ads?

Describing Google’s revenue growth has become a problem, it so vastly outpaces the human capacity to understand large numbers and percentage growth rates. The company earned more than $113 billion in Q4 2025, and more than $400 billion in the past year.