Rat Race Armaggeddon: How Oracle Unity Brings Adtech and Martech Together into a Connected Experience

Consumer behaviors have changed. The internet and mobile revolution have disrupted how the world takes in information and empowered consumers to explore, discover, and buy anytime, anywhere. Marketers must engage customers wherever they are, which means a consistent omnichannel approach for personalization.

Still, companies face mounting challenges in achieving these goals. New restrictions around data collection and limitations on common industry identifiers used to transact digital advertising curtail marketers’ abilities to identify users and promote relevant content. Amidst these changes in infrastructure, consumer trust has also been shaken by data breaches and an overuse in targeting efforts by advertisers, which comes off as “ad stalking” to the consumer.

In response, the digital advertising industry has introduced more complexity and uncertainty with new product categories, short-term “work-arounds”, and announcements of industry initiatives that have yet to bear fruit. Digital marketers have too many tools at their disposal, and it is hard to distinguish what tools are needed to execute on any given marketing strategy. As data sharing between platforms becomes more restricted, the path forward for first-party data activation requires a strong foundation that ensures compliance with evolving restrictions and regulation around user privacy and consent.

Digital marketing is changing, and Oracle is leading the way

New digital privacy laws, such as the GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, are fundamentally transforming marketing and advertising. Oracle is embracing this pivotal moment to help define the future of digital advertising. Product innovation is centered around solving marketers’ challenges, namely:

Data strategy: Transition to a first-party data centric strategy
User consent: Consented identity is the currency of the future
Measurement: Make every impression count
Data activation: Connect across Adtech, Martech, and beyond!

Oracle Unity, Oracle’s enterprise-grade customer data platform (CDP), powers next-generation Adtech strategies and enables forward-thinking marketers to unify customer data for segmentation and data-informed orchestration. That, in turn, will help provide a hyper-personalized experience.

A seamless transition to a first-party data-centric strategy

The death of the third-party cookie will disrupt every marketers’ campaign strategy, but digital advertising is not going away. In fact, digital ad spend is growing! eMarketer projects that digital ad spending will top $500 billion by 2024 and make up over 60% of a CMO’s media ad spend. Furthermore, of the average 12 hours US consumers spend engaging with media per day, more than 6 are spent on digital.

Given third-party cookie enabled identifiers are eventually going away, forward-thinking marketers are actively investing in solutions that address first-party data and user consent. First-party data will have an outsized role for marketers to drive meaningful business outcomes given the right strategy and technology investment.

Oracle harmonizes the relationship between Martech and Adtech by harnessing the design principals of its marketing and advertising products around first-party data and identity. Oracle Unity provides a central location to ingest and house all first-party data sources from demographic and transactional data that resides within a CRM system or data lake, to behavioral data from online digital interactions collected from websites and mobile apps.

Additionally, Oracle’s new Smart Content Classification feature enables digital marketers to leverage contextual intelligence and automatically classify profiles based on the context of site pages visited by each user. This way, you won’t ever miss out on capturing new valuable data attributes to inform targeting.

Consented identity is the currency of the future

Oracle Unity bridges the gap between identity spaces by connecting user profiles across known, unknown and hidden (pseudonymous) spaces. Once data enters Oracle Unity, identity resolution unifies profiles to obtain a single customer profile. This foundational element opens the door for marketers to further maximize investments in first-party data and user consent:

Oracle’s private device graph capabilities allow marketers to use existing CRM-based private IDs for advanced identity resolution across all available first-party data identifiers. The device graph connects and builds a relationship of a known and consented user across all of his/her devices. Consented user identifiers, such as email addresses, equip marketers to activate CRM data without the use of an offline match provider. This enables streamlined workflow to deliver hashed email data to walled gardens.
Oracle offers an open and extensible ecosystem for marketers to access a broad range of quality data as well as tools to connect and utilize first-party consented identity. With a second-party data strategy, marketers can seamlessly share first-party data with outside organizations for further data enrichment and the execution of joint marketing campaigns.
Anchored around a privacy-by-design approach, new flexible user permission tools provide greater precision and control with regards to how data is managed and shared between groups across an organization.
Additionally, Oracle has partnered with two industry-leading consent management vendors, OneTrust and Sourcepoint, to allow marketers to transmit user choices to indicate consent and request data that Oracle has collected in accordance with local and international compliance laws (i.e. opt out and deletion).

Every impression counts

Campaign optimization and measurement offers a cost-efficient approach that also creates a more pleasing interaction for the customer. A robust measurement strategy must go further than simply assessing engagement across owned channels, but also look to media insights (i.e. clicks, impressions, etc.) from customer touchpoints across the open web.

Oracle’s burgeoning Martech infrastructure will allow marketers to assess how engagement contributes to conversions across digital channels. Post-campaign reporting – available within Oracle Unity – measures the impact of marketing efforts across the customer’s entire digital journey.

In addition to more enhanced media engagement metrics, marketers can also leverage over 100 pre-built intelligent attributes and an intelligence layer for real-time behavioral data collection and decisioning.

With Oracle Unity, connect across Adtech, Martech and beyond!

Oracle is transforming data management capabilities to better compliment systems of customer record and help marketers gain cost efficiencies with a simplified data and tech stack.

The design principle revolves around a collection of Adtech services to act as a bridge between Oracle’s Martech and Adtech capabilities. Services in Oracle Unity give marketers the tools to bi-directionally activate data across both marketing and digital advertising channels to orchestrate a personalized experience across all customer touchpoints —all accessible via a user experience and API.

Consumer buying signals are everywhere. A forward-thinking data strategy extends beyond marketing into service, sales, and commerce. Oracle understands consumers don’t grasp the intricacies of brand interactions across touchpoints, but they do expect a seamless, connected experience centered on the brand, which a customer data platform can help provide.

Oracle Unity is further developing connections with Oracle CX Sales, CX Service, and CX Commerce to equip the modern marketer with far-reaching insight to create a personalized journey for the customer.