Oracle gives marketers hands-on access to cross-platform audience data

For more than a year, Oracle has been building up the capabilities of ID Graph, a tool in the Oracle Data Cloud that helps marketers understand consumer behavior across channels.

On Wednesday, Oracle announced it's putting ID Graph directly into the hands of marketers with an enhanced version of Audience Builder, the user interface within the Oracle Data Management Platform. The updated Audience Builder makes it easier for customers to manage and select certain types of customer identities, in order to analyze audiences based on the device or platform within which the ID was created.

"In the past, you weren't really able to manage all of these different identities and where they were going," Oracle senior product marketing manager Karen Kokiko said to ZDNet. "Marketers knew customers were making these journeys across devices... A consumer can shop online on their mobile phone on the way to work, and when they get to work, they go online and do more searching from their desktop, and when they get home they buy from there."

With the enhanced DMP interface, marketers can understand where transactions happen, better optimize their media buys and "engage with your customer in a way they want to be communicated with," she said.

The Audience Builder interface lets marketers craft audiences for their campaigns using a combination of their own data and third-party data sources. The enhanced version allows for improved means of targeting, such as activating first and third-party audiences on channels against their mobile ad IDs based on behaviors like mobile app installs.

The technology behind the upgrades, built into ID Graph, came together through a series of acquisitions Oracle has made over the years. With BlueKai and its more recent acquisition of AddThis, Oracle has an "insanely huge online footprint," Kokiko said, tracking visitors across 15 million websites. In 2015, Datalogix gave Oracle data from more than 110 million US households. Meanwhile, this year's acquisition of Crosswise gave Oracle the infrastructure to piece together individual consumer identities.

Collectively, those acquisitions have "enabled us to build this robust solution for sequence-based marketing across known and anonymous environments," Kokiko said, leaving Oracle "very uniquely positioned to solve this problem."