Thursday, April 20, 2017

Oracle buys MOAT

Oracle have just announced that they are buying MOAT.

MOAT is a brand safety and visibility measurement company. They've come from a world where they've helped the programmatic world build trust when the main adservers were struggling.

Their main reason for existing is that they have brought a product to market quicker than Google were able to and have consistently stayed ahead of Google's trailing adserving platform.

I can see why MOAT is a valuable company in itself. They've got really strong relationships with publishers, they've gone through the certification process in order to be accepted across most industry bodies and they've built strong relationships with agencies. Given the recent brand safety issues, they're not going anywhere soon.

The question is how they will add value to Oracle's cloud service. Oracle at the moment are almost purely a data player. They sell big databases to store data, they have sources of data and they sell some things that help you activate your data.

From a data point of view, MOAT tells you if your ad was viewed. Integrating with Blue Kai so you can target viewers sounds good, but Blue Kai didn't need to buy the company to do this integration. It also will restrict them from pairing with other companies in this space.

From a tech point of view, MOAT's integration into Oracle is likely to slow them down. Aligning with Oracle's overall roadmap won't be fun and will likely meanthey can no longer run ahead of Doubleclick.

From a client point of view, MOAT is in a strong position within the marketplace. Most people who are going to go with a verification provider have already done it. There's a clear competitive set and MOAT have relationships at all relevant points in the ecosystem. Blue Kai has equivalent relationships so I don't see that Oracle will be able to do a better sales job than MOAT.

From an ownership point of view, it's good that they've not been bought by a media owner so we can have some continuing independence in the measurement space. The less that can be bought by Facebook or Google the better!

Overall, it's a strange acquisition. I don't really see a clear benefit for either party. I assume MOAT wanted money, which is always good. I don't think Oracle will particularly remember that they bought MOAT in five years.