Published 6/18
Last week, a lot of things happened in the Advertising Technologies industry:
Oracle shut down their AdTech business
Oracle shut down its AdTech business, which plummeted from USD $2B in revenue to USD $300 million. This trend is expected, given the new privacy regulations.
Data management platforms (DMPs) are losing their ability to capture the digital footprints of users across the web. If you work in marketing, you're likely aware that third-party cookies are disappearing in Google Chrome and are already gone in several browsers like Safari and Firefox
When I started working in advertising technologies back in 2017, Bluekai was one of the leading DMPs to work with. They were a robust provider of B2B data, because they sourced some of the data from their POS (point-of-sales) technology.
As a large company, Oracle acquired several others, like ShareThis. Although the news of shutting down is not surprising, it confirms the trend. Earlier this year Salesforce shut down its DMP (Salesforce Audience Studio) due to the inability to keep cookies in sync with buying platforms.
If you haven't focused on developing a strong data strategy, consider this your wake-up call.
If you want lo learn more about the news, here is a more detailed coverage: https://martech.org/oracle-says-goodbye-to-the-adtech-business/
Retail media & Cleanrooms are growing
While DMPs may be on the decline, retail media networks are expanding rapidly. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are solutions offered by retailers to provide audiences to brands. They leverage loyalty programs, purchase trends, and sophisticated segmentations to offer brands the exposure they need.
Several established players already dominate the space, and the latest entrant is Costco, you can learn more in this Forbes news
Also, if you are interested in learning more about Retail Media, you can find more information in this IAB/MRC Retail Media Measurement Guidelines document
The title of this post though, is that you should choose your partners carefully. There is a wide difference in the ways these partners work in terms of technical capabilities.
Updated 6/19:
Snowflake suffered a Data Leak due to clients missconfiguration of their accounts.
165 companies were affected! That's a big number.
Snowflakes value proposition is that they have a strong focus on developer experience, so unfortunately, it seems developers on those 165 didn't do their job of
Now, I learned about it because I am a customer of Santander (the bank) and I got an email from a newspaper I'm subscribed. The BBC published a good article covering the news.
After I published this post, a Snowflake team member reached out to me to share the official blog post they keep updated with latest information about the breach and Mandiants official post on their findings
TL;DR - Most recently, Mandiant concluded that Snowflake systems were not breached and affected customers accounts suffered unauthorized access due to credential scraping. These accounts did not enforce MFA which would have prevented the unauthorized access.
MFA is a pain in the ass, but it would surely have helped prevent this Data Breach.
If you are in doubt, reach out!