- Oracle announced plans to shrink its advertising division during its fiscal 2024 earnings report.
- Oracle's advertising revenue fell from $2 billion in 2022 to $300 million in fiscal 2024.
- Major changes and a lack of investment in Meta's advertising business have led to Oracle's advertising ambitions being diminished.
Oracle is getting out of the advertising business.
The company revealed plans to scale back its advertising division during its fourth-quarter earnings report for fiscal 2024. As Business Insider previously reported, advertising revenue is expected to be $300 million in fiscal 2024, down significantly from $2 billion in fiscal 2022.
Over the years, Oracle has spent more than $4 billion acquiring companies to capture advertising dollars, reportedly buying marketing technology company BlueKai for $400 million and data broker Datalogix for $1.2 billion in 2014. Oracle also acquired once-buzzworthy measurement company Moat for a reported $850 million in 2017.
Oracle's role in the advertising industry has been shrinking in recent years as the software giant had big ambitions to help marketers combine data from websites, email, sales and social media to create consistent, more effective ads.
Oracle's advertising and marketing business took a major hit in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Meta banned third parties like Oracle from selling advertiser data used to buy targeted ads. After that, Oracle tried to pitch cookie-free products to marketers but couldn't find one that was a good fit, Business Insider previously reported.
Former employees previously told Business Insider that Oracle had failed to invest in its two advertising and marketing products, Marketing Cloud and Oracle Advertising, after Oracle tried to merge the two divisions in a major reorganization that led to mass layoffs in 2022.
Oracle is the latest software giant to pull back from advertising. Rival Adobe shut down a core part of its advertising business in 2020, and Salesforce.com has seen mixed successes and failures in advertising.
