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Driving by Oracle’s gleaming blue-green, Emerald City-like headquarters on the San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, Calif., one could say that it resembles a castle that Larry Ellison built. Which is pretty close to what it is.
Now the company castle has a Moat to go with it.
The world’s largest database maker reportedly will pay $850 million to acquire Moat, a company that specializes in tracking digital advertising.
Seven-year-old Moat describes itself as “a SaaS-based search engine for display ads, enabling users to find and discover their favorite brands.” It actually does a lot more than that.
Oracle said New York City-based Moat will serve as an independent platform within Oracle Data Cloud to provide measurement, analytics and intelligence for brands such as Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Unilever, along with publishers such as ESPN, Facebook, NBCUniversal, Snapchat and YouTube.
Moat’s enterprise client base, attention-based analytics and intelligence suite provide a complement to Oracle Data Cloud’s audience targeting and measurement solutions, the company said.
Essentially, Moat will be used as an auditor for digital ad buyers, in which it checks to see where paid-for ads are appearing where they’re supposed to appear. A good many plans can go off the rails in a marketing or sales campaign, and Moat is designed to see that plans stay on track and that ads are run in a timely fashion.
Facebook and Google, two of the largest advertising companies in the world, each allow Moat to assess ads that run on their platforms. For example, Google subsidiary YouTube recently revealed that it would work with Moat to help advertisers verify that their messages aren’t running adjacent to offensive videos.
According to Crunchbase, Moat has raised $67.5 million in four rounds of venture funding from 17 investors. Co-founder brothers Jonah (CEO) and Noah Goodhart will remain with Moat and continue to be based in NYC.