Tech giant Oracle is aiming to build a moat between itself and its marketing cloud competitors with its latest acquisition. The company announced late yesterday that it has agreed to buy digital ad measurement cloud company Moat for an undisclosed sum.

Moat will become a subsidiary of Oracle, operating within the auspices of its Oracle Cloud Data division, although the company was careful to mention that the acquired company will continue to operate independently.

"Moat has grown its attention analytics business by over 100 [percent] in the past year, providing actionable insights around viewability, brand safety, non-human traffic, and ad creative to over 600 publisher, brand and agency clients," said Eric Roza, SVP and GM of Oracle Data Cloud, in a statement. "With the Moat acquisition, Oracle Data Cloud now offers brands and publishers a full suite of targeting and measurement solutions to improve the outcome of virtually every type of digital advertising campaign."

Attention Analytics

New York-based Moat provides ad measuring analytics to digital platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Pinterest, that depend on advertising for their business models. According to Oracle, Moat's existing enterprise client base will help complement its own, while the new technologies it brings to the table will allow Oracle to provide companies with a full suite of ad targeting and measurement solutions.

In particular, acquiring Moat will give Oracle access to something called “attention analytics" that typically refers to the tools that help Web sites see which parts of their pages visitors focus on most. That information can then be used to create advertising pricing based on which parts of the screen are most viewed by visitors. Oracle specifically noted that Moat’s tools could be used with video and display advertising.

The addition of Moat's clients brings the number of Oracle's clients to more than 600, including 97 of the top 100 U.S. advertisers. Oracle claimed the combination of services resulting from the merger will represent the most comprehensive cloud platform for marketing data and analytics in the world, allowing it to provide tools for virtually every type of digital advertising campaign.

Digital Advertising Faces Growing Pains

Oracle has been pursuing an aggressive growth strategy for its Oracle Data Cloud division over the past several years. The company has expanded the unit through several acquisitions, including Datalogix and BlueKai, as it looks to compete with other major tech providers in the sector such as Adobe, Salesforce, IBM, and Nielsen.

The market for digital advertising has skyrocketed in recent years, with advertisers expecting to spend more than $100 billion on digital ads by 2019. But despite the rapid growth, the sector has recently run into a number of problems ranging from ads appearing alongside videos or other content that the advertiser may not wish to be associated with to users skipping past or otherwise avoiding ads that automatically appear alongside other content.

Those problems have lead to the recent development of companies like Moat and its competitors that claim to improve the effectiveness of digital campaigns through the use of their analytics tools.