You don’t need to be a structural engineer to know when a building isn’t up to code, sometimes it’s better to tear the whole thing down.

That was the case with Oracle’s ad business: Something that was once headline news is now relegated to the obituaries because it couldn’t keep up with the times.

But big vacuums — like the one left behind by Oracle — can also mean big opportunities. With change in the air, now’s the time to reevaluate the foundations of our current marketing ecosystem and plan for a better, more effective and more privacy-friendly future. Let’s dive in.

Identity as infrastructure

Oracle’s exit presents a moment for us to take a fresh look at some hard-to-swallow marketing truths, and here’s one of them: Anyone relying on third-party cookies for marketing audiences is about to be left in the dust.

This may seem obvious in retrospect, but we just saw it unfold with Oracle; its business was cookie-based right up until the end, and its inflexibility to futureproof its proprietary data assets is one of the main reasons the company didn’t make it.

Instead, it’s time to embrace a new, identity-powered paradigm where advanced identity graphs capture virtually every available identifier. In terms of getting a real picture of consumers, it’s the difference between looking through the keyhole and opening the door.

Today, the 360-degree, customer view that identity enables is just table stakes. Without a robust grasp of online and offline activity, with broad coverage across most US adults and households, you’re at risk of missing out on key insights, making ill-informed bets, and delivering irrelevant messages to your audiences. Any way you slice it, without identity, you’re going to struggle to keep up with the times — just like Oracle.

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The privacy imperative

If your stack isn’t sourcing, resolving and activating your data assets responsibly, to say you’re on shaky ground would be an understatement.

There’s a commonsense element at play here. Forging relationships with well-established partners that have robust data privacy policies is a much surer bet than rolling the dice on a less scrupulous provider.  Think of it as a long-term investment — if your partner has a history of compliance at its core, you’re much more likely to navigate today’s choppy regulatory seas unscathed.

And as expanding privacy regulations in the US make first-party data harder to come by, many marketers are turning to third-party providers to fill gaps in their data assets. But not all third-party data providers are created equal — at least when it comes to privacy.

Because the current  environment is so complex, one of the most important things marketers should be looking for when sourcing consumer data is compliance. Finding the perfect audience to fit your marketing needs isn’t going to be particularly helpful if its underlying data is far from compliant.

But industry changes are helping. Historically, the onus has been on marketers to vet the provenance of third-party data products they’re using. However, the introduction of new standardization frameworks (like our own partnership with SafeGuard Privacy) have flipped this script. Instead of marketers having to go through the time-consuming process of continuous evaluation, it’s now up to the data providers to prove the data they’re offering is.

A proactive focus on reliable, privacy-centric data partnerships that are built to last isn’t just important — it’s an imperative.

Data where you want it

New laws aren’t the only thing injecting complexity into the marketing ecosystem. With the proliferation of new channels and platforms, what used to be a straight line from advertiser to audience is now more like a maze.

Consumers are engaging with a wider array of media than ever. To reach audiences regardless of where they’re consuming content, marketers need the ability to activate their data across every endpoint that matters, not just a select few.

This increased complexity also extends behind the curtain. Marketers need ways to activate data to multiple endpoints and more safely and securely work with multiple partners, whether that’s through a clean room or in a cloud environment where data doesn’t even need to move to enable collaboration.

The future of marketing is one of flexibility — where marketers can get their messages in front of the right audiences and seamlessly collaborate with any partner, all without having to worry about technical limitations. It should no longer be about what we can’t do anymore — it should be about what we can do.

Forging ahead

Oracle’s departure from the advertising world created a lot of questions about what the future of martech might look like. But that absence also creates an opportunity to build something better.

When you fill a gap in a foundation, you do it with concrete, not papier mâché. And with a renewed focus on sustainable data and open collaboration, we, as an industry, are going to do just that.

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