Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Bye-Bye Sizmek! Amazon Advances Flashtalking And Smartly As Alternatives In Advance Of The Shutdown
According to emails seen by AdExchanger that were sent to Amazon customers this week, Amazon is officially naming integration partners to offload clients of the Sizmek ad suite, now the Amazon Ad Server.
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The Year Ad Tech Went To The Cloud
The deification of data clean rooms, the need for privacy compliance and this year’s generative AI explosion were just a few of the trends pushing businesses away from owning and maintaining their own servers and toward cloud-based tech infrastructure.
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If 2023 Was The Last Year Of Third-Party Cookies, Did Programmatic Make The Most Of It?
By this time next year, advertisers will need to have already put their post-cookie campaign strategies in place. Did advertisers and ad tech companies use the extra time they had thanks to multiple deadline delays wisely or did they procrastinate?
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Snowflake Acquires Data Clean Room Startup Samooha
Snowflake has acquired Samooha, a startup that develops software to make clean room technology accessible to marketers who aren’t necessarily SQL wizards or data scientists.
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Why The Big Will Only Get Bigger In New Retail
Over the past couple of years, thousands of retail industry trends have been flying around like loose threads. But, through it all, one fact stands above all other mere trends: to the biggest go the spoils.
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MikMak And Circana Partner To Connect In-Store Data To Digital CPG Marketing
MikMak, an ecommerce ad analytics company that began as an online add-to-cart specialist, is figuring out more and more how to get things in a physical shopping cart.
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The Web Is Reanimating Its Affiliate Networks
This week, the AdExchanger Commerce newsletter examined a microcosm of the affiliate marketing and ecommerce business in the form of CNN Underscored, the news company’s product-selling site and content marketing unit.
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The ANA Releases Its Second Transparency Report – Hits The Open Web As 25% Waste
It isn’t fair to summarize a report that spans 125 pages and took three years to complete into a few brash words. But the ANA is coming for your ad tech margin.
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Holiday Shopping Soars As Sellers See Their Prices Hit Rock Bottom
Advertising and product pricing are opposite sides of the same coin, which begs the question: To reach a new customer, are you better off spending another dollar on advertising or dropping your price by $1?
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Adalytics Exposes An Alleged $10.5 Billion Black Hole In The Google Search Partners Program
Adalytics published a new transparency report digging into the GSP, a largely unknown and completely nontransparent search ad network.
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Retail Advertisers Battle Ad Platforms Obsessed With Discounts
There are signs of soft consumer spending this holiday season, and retailers and big online marketplaces are pushing harder than ever to bring down prices and promote discounts.
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PODCAST: The Big StoryThe Big Story: The Specialists Are Back
This week we take a look at the rise of new specialist DSPs that thrive in respective categories, regardless of the power of omnichannel giants. Also, why targeting US Hispanic audiences – or by language and ethnicity in general – has been so messy and inaccurate.
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksThe State Of Media Analytics – And American Rugby – With A Kiwi Entrepreneur
Google Analytics dominates the analytics market – but analytics isn’t a zero-sum game, says Ben Young, CEO of insights and measurement startup Nudge. Also: The important of measuring attention and finding “value at the margins.”
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The Specialist DSPs Giving Omnichannel Giants A Run For Their Money
There are no new DSPs out there. Nobody’s investing in the category. Google, Amazon and The Trade Desk won, and there’s no point trying to become another omnichannel DSP for everything. That isn’t true, mind you.
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The Trade Desk Reports Strong Q3 Numbers But Warns Of A Potential Slowdown
Last quarter, The Trade Desk reported revenue growth of 25% YOY at $493 million and profit up from $16 million in Q3 2022 to $39 million this year. But the good topline results were washed out as investors reacted to The Trade Desk’s pessimistic guidance for Q4.
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’Tis The Season For Meta’s Ad Platform Glitches
For many, the holidays start with the post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend. For me, holiday traditions begin in late October, when the Meta ad platform goes haywire.
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Performance Max Introduces Auto-Generated Text And Image Creative
Google’s Performance Max announced the public launch of its auto-generated creative content.
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Ad Tech Companies Are Getting Graded On Log-File Transparency
TAG TrustNet is publishing its first register of ad tech companies that share log-file data, don’t share log files and kinda sorta share log-level data.
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Criteo Is Finally Not A Retargeting Company Anymore
A true epoch of ad tech has passed. Criteo’s retargeting revenue was less than half the company’s total earnings in Q3, a first for the company.
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Amazon Readies Its Big Play To Scoop Up Non-Amazon Ad Dollars
On Amazon’s earnings call last week, CEO Andy Jassy said the company has “barely scraped the surface” of its advertising business potential. Generating $12 billion in ad revenue last quarter doesn’t seem like “barely” scratching the surface. But Jassy’s right – Amazon Ads is just getting started.
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Omnicom Plants Its Flag In Commerce Media With An $835 Million Deal For Flywheel Digital
On Monday, Omnicom entered the ecommerce marketplace services space in a big way with an $835 million deal to buy Flywheel Digital.
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The Custom Bidder Startups Taking On The Walled Gardens
The growing popularity of platform-based custom bidders has helped normalize the idea of AI-based bidding, giving a boost to a small market of programmatic-focused non-platform customer bidding startups that existed before the walled garden versions.
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Alphabet’s Revenue Grows By Another 11%, As Retail And AI Take Center Stage
Alphabet’s strong revenue numbers were “led by solid growth in the retail vertical” across search and YouTube, Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said during Alphabet’s earnings call.
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How NCSolutions Went From Pulling Info From Store Receipts To Cloud Shopper Data Seller
NCSolutions, leader of the old guard of shopper marketing data suppliers, has revamped its go-to market model, culminating this year with a new clean room data product, Insights Stream, which takes the company’s in-store shopping receipts data to the cloud.
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DTC Grocery Brands Thrive On Social, But Can They Win In Retail?
DTC brands bring sharpened audiences and keyword targeting to search-based grocery platforms. But can they beat the CPG giants at their own game?
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Marketer’s Guide: Why You Need To Know About The New Ecommerce Ad Metrics
As ecommerce grows – and advertisers become increasingly wary of proxy measurement – newer metrics are emerging to help buyers better understand how ad spend affects their bottom line.
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Narrative, Snowflake and TTD Take Data Marketplace Sales To The Cloud
Snowflake, The Trade Desk and Narrative are going to market with a new cloud-based data marketplace approach.
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New Working Group Wants To Expedite Retail Media OpenRTB Standards
Programmatic retail media is stuck in a holding pattern until there are OpenRTB standards – the protocols for automated online advertising – that address sponsored listings.
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Rotten To The Core – But In The Right Way
DTC brand operators and other ecommerce marketers are attracted to expertise coming from someone who can show how they made it work for themselves “with skin in the game,” says Barry Hott, a marketing consultant and new head of growth for the DTC candy brand Rotten.
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Why MFA Is Ad Tech’s Biggest Problem – But Also Its Easiest To Solve
By the middle of this year, MFA sites were gobbling up 30% of ad auctions, and this “gradual boil” now has the entire industry in a state of emergency, says Chris Kane, president and founder of Jounce Media.