Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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LiveRamp Revenue Bounces Back As It Reaches The Clouds
LiveRamp has always been a facilitator, a data platform that plugs into your tech stack. Nowadays, that means being a cloud-jumping service provider.
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Criteo Profits Bounce Back, But There’s A Tough Year Ahead
The Criteo bounce back is in full effect after the company reported strong profit growth and continues to hit benchmarks distancing it from the old days of retargeting.
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Amazon Juices Profits, With A Big Assist From The Ads Biz
Wall Street wanted profits. Big Tech delivered. That was the case for Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and – more than any other US tech giant – Amazon.
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Were We Wrong About the Value of First-Party Data?
There are myriad reasons behind any business failure. But the failure of so many DTC brands raises the uncomfortable question: Were we wrong about the value of first-party data?
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Google’s Ad Revenue Rockets Upward Again, But The Open Web Is Getting Less
Google has always been the internet waystation. People arrive to be shuttled someplace else. Increasingly, though, Google is the destination.
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First-Party Data On Ice? How Conagra’s Birds Eye Brand Navigates The New Video Ecosystem
Conagra-owned brand Birds Eye brings a new approach to online video, social shopping and first-party data.
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LiveRamp Acquires Habu, As Walled Gardens Put The Squeeze On Indie Data Collaboration Tech
LiveRamp will acquire Habu for $200 million, further consolidating the data clean room tech category.
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ASICS Shows How Ad Experimentation Is Like Running A Marathon
ASICS is testing data clean rooms and other cloud-based advertising solutions. It shows why vendor and channel tests are important, but not for the faint of heart.
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How A Gym Chain Became An Ad Data Seller
Planet Fitness is hiring an in-house ad sales team to win agency and advertiser budgets for its omnichannel media netw … Wait, what? That’s right. The gym chain has an RMN now.
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Google Tells Ad Tech To Take Its Medicine And Give The Privacy Sandbox A Try
In a blog post on Wednesday, Google’s senior director of product management, Victor Wong, defended the Privacy Sandbox APIs and laid out in very direct terms the flaws Google sees in common criticisms of its sandbox proposals.
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Retail Search Startup Symbiosys Raises $9 Million For Its ‘Collaborative Bidding’ Model
One retail search startup, Symbiosys, which launched last year, is trying to clean up the clutter with an idea it calls collaborative bidding
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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.