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You Don't Have To Be An Oracle To Know That Digital Advertising Is Brutal

Mike Shields

Advertising isn't for everybody.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a trend piece for the Wall Street Journal titled "Marketing Cloud Companies Blow Into Cannes". As data management and customer data platforms quickly became digital marketing staples, Oracle, Adobe, IBM and others were coming on strong. A few years and multiple acquisitions ago, Adobe pulled the plug. You don't hear from IBM much these days, and now Oracle has just bailed, as a $2 billion business suddenly became $300 million.

Advertising is a challenging nut to crack, even for deep pocketed companies seemingly built on technological prowess.

Just ask the phone companies. Just a few years ago, Verizon went big into ads, buying up AOL and Yahoo. We all know about AT&T's misadventures. And while T-Mobile is still hanging in there, a few weeks ago Erickson shuttered its attempt to marry wireless data with ad targeting. Singtel did the same two years ago.

There are different reasons for why all these examples ultimately didn't work, but it often starts with where advertising fits inside of a company. It's not an easy thing to excel at when its not your core, especially when you are competing with titans like Google, Meta, The Trade Desk and so on - and all they do is ads.

I'm not saying this history will repeat itself - but it could be a cautionary tale for all these companies pushing into retail media. You've got to be all in, or ok with a lot of spending and potential losses for a while.

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