Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ACQUISITIONS & MERGERS NEWS: Competition, privacy concerns raised over Oracle-Datalogix tie-up, (Dec 23, 2014)

By Jeffrey May, J.D.

Oracle's announcement yesterday that it would acquire data broker Datalogix is raising antitrust and privacy concerns from at least one group. The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a U.S. consumer protection and privacy organization, is calling on the FTC to closely scrutinize the proposed deal.

According to Oracle’s announcement, Datalogix “connects offline purchasing data to digital media to improve audience targeting and measure sales impact.” Oracle intends to make Datalogix part of the Oracle Data Cloud. “With Datalogix, Oracle Data Cloud will deliver the richest understanding of consumers across both digital and traditional channels based on what they do, what they say, and what they buy, enabling leading brands to personalize and measure every customer interaction and maximize the value of their digital marketing,” the company said.

Among other things, Datalogix provides marketers with aggregate information measuring how their ads on Facebook drive sales for their products in stores. According to Facebook, its partnership with Datalogix “allows marketers to better understand the value of the investments they are making in Facebook and helps us provide advertising that is more interesting to our users.” Twitter also partners with Datalogix to “quantify the impact of Promoted and organic Tweets on offline sales for consumer packaged goods (CPG) businesses in the United States.”

CDD suggests that the planned acquisition raises competition concerns in light of the growing consolidation of consumer information. It notes Oracle's deal earlier this year to acquire BlueKai—“the industry's leading cloud-based big data platform.” When the BlueKai acquisition was announced in February, Oracle said that the deal would “extend the world's largest Marketing Cloud with the leading Data Management Platform to personalize marketing programs and customer experience.”

In addition, CDD questioned the deal's impact on the privacy of Americans. “Given the FTC's 20-year consent decree with Facebook, and the role that Datalogix plays with the social network, it also must review whether the deal requires additional safeguards under that decree,” the group said in a statement released yesterday. “Both Oracle and Datalogix are members of the EU/US Data Protection Safe Harbor program and the commission must examine how this pending databroker/consumer targeting acquisition impacts that program.”

FTC examination of data brokers. Earlier this year, the FTC released a report, entitled “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability,” recommending that Congress consider establishing legislation to require more transparency among data brokers and to allow consumers to have greater control over the copious amounts of personal information collected and shared by these companies. Datalogix was among the nine data brokers involved with the agency's study.

Companies: Datalogix Holdings, Inc.; Oracle Corp.

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