Oracle Corp. quietly announced today it’s acquiring a company called Grapeshot Ltd., which has built marketing platform centered on ensuring brand safety.

Grapeshot uses artificial intelligence to help marketers avoid placing advertisements alongside potentially damaging content online. For example, its system would automatically prevent an ad for dairy company being placed on a website that targets vegans.

The brand safety feature is just one aspect of Grapeshot’s marketing platform, which the company likes to call a “contextual intelligence system.” Grapeshot said its platform is unique in that it’s designed to grow brands’ audiences by targeting the most relevant content for advertisements in real time. It works by scanning the web for fresh and relevant content such as breaking news and trending themes, so it can place ads where they’ll get maximum exposure.

According to Oracle, Grapeshot is pretty popular with more than 5,000 marketing users worldwide, covering about 38 billion ad impressions. Oracle also pointed to Grapeshot’s encouraging growth rate, which it said is “well over” 100 percent.

As for Oracle’s plans, the database giant said it will infuse Grapeshot’s technology with its Oracle Data Cloud. The idea is to complement that service’s custom audience segments feature, providing more capability for its “Audience and Measurement” tools. In the short term, Grapeshot will continue to work with its existing customers, Oracle said.

Oracle’s Data Cloud is actually one of the company’s “best kept secrets,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. He noted that Oracle has been quietly building out and enriching the platform and that Grapeshot’s contextual intelligence capabilities should help further these efforts. “Contextual information is hard to capture as it can stale rapidly, so this can become a key asset for Oracle Data Cloud,” Mueller said.

Oracle has gobbled up a number of marketing-related firms in recent years. These include its acquisition of the ad measurement firm Moat Inc. last year, as well as data management platform provider BlueKai Inc. and Datalogix Inc., which allows marketers to track how online ads affect offline buying.

“Grapeshot will help advertisers and marketers avoid unsafe content that will damage brand equity before they place bids,” said Cindy Zhou, who also works at Constellation Research. “This acquisition works well with Moat’s measurement capabilities.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image: Grapeshot/Facebook