Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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Shopify Audiences Adds Criteo, Its First Open Web Ads Partner
Shopify Audiences debuted last year with only Google and Meta. In January, Pinterest was added to the mix. Now TikTok, Snap and, notably, Criteo will be able to plug into Shopify for modeled data.
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Why Sam Cox Left Big Tech And Sees Opportunity In Programmatic Chaos
Before the pandemic, the pace of programmatic had slowed, and people in the ad industry had a grasp of how things worked. But third-party deprecation, regulations and privacy policies, threw online advertising back in turmoil. “That’s the fun part for me,” says Sam Cox.
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Retail Media Cannot Be Standardized – Yet ‘Standards’ Are Coming
Some form of retail media standardization seems inevitable at this point. But retail media campaigns defy the notion of standardization.
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Snowflake Touts Its Status As A Marketing And Ad Tech Power Player
Snowflake is “becoming infrastructure for businesses developing data-driven marketing applications,” CMO Denise Persson told AdExchanger.
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How Old-School CPGs Are Leaning In On Generative AI
How will gen-AI content resonate – or not – with consumers? That’s the big question, according to Todd Hassenfelt, Colgate-Palmolive’s ecommerce director.
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InMobi Acquires Quantcast’s Consent Management Platform
Consent is becoming one of the most important requirements in online advertising – and InMobi wants to help publishers collect it.
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Is The Rise Of Indie Newsletter Writers And Podcasters Just Another Bubble?
Years ago, as the tide turned against top digital publishers like BuzzFeed, Vice and HuffPost, there was a minor renaissance of small or one-person publishers with a podcast and newsletter. Now comes the hard part: Proving it was the right move.
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What Ad Slump? The Trade Desk Powers On With Its ‘We’re Not-A-Walled-Garden’ Pitch
The Trade Desk continued its run of growth, reporting Q2 total revenue of $464 million, a 23% jump from last year.
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Amazon Advertising Fuels Another Growth Spurt, But Investors Only Have Eyes For AI
Amazon crushed its quarterly earnings report on Thursday evening, increasing its market cap by more than $100 billion overnight – and it did so with a major assist from its advertising business.
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Will Triple Whale Continue To Be A Popular Analytics Vendor If It Makes Money?
In just two years, Triple Whale became a popular tool for Shopify merchants and social-based ecommerce sellers. But it did so by getting its data visualization and analytics service into people’s hands at ridiculously low rates.
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As YouTube TV Takes Off, Cheap Programmatic Finds Its Way Into Tentpole TV
Premium YouTube TV inventory, including tentpole live sports, is finding its way down to general DV360 CTV auction campaigns, and is clearing at major CPM discounts compared to the direct deal rates.
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Examining An Oddity – And Whether A Product Brand Can Be Too Data-Driven
The aptly named Oddity Tech, an Israeli DTC brand operator, doesn’t fit neatly in one category. It’s a skincare and cosmetics seller, that aims to be a tech and data brand.
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AWS Launches A Solution For Off-The-Shelf ID Resolution
Amazon Web Services took another step in its development as a key ad tech integration hub on Wednesday, with the general launch of a product called Entity Resolution.
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The Google Ad Machine Returns To Growth, And Hypes Gen AI As Its Next Big Thing
Investors on Alphabet’s Q2 earnings call appeared satisfied that YouTube and the ads business in general are back on track. Their attention, unsurprisingly, turned to the potential opportunities for generative AI.
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DTC Brands Are Trying Something New, By Building In Public
This week, we’re digging into the DTC biz. Not the metrics or the paid media, exactly, but the information and personal support systems that have grown up as people in the industry experienced wild ups and downs of both business and personal well-being.
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Mike Welch Joins Captify As CEO As Third-Party Search Data Gears Up For A Major Change
Third-party data companies have a bad rap lately, especially in Europe. But to be a successful programmatic player requires serious adaption skills, said incoming Captify CEO Mike Welch.
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Amazon Prime Day Was A Sales Success. Now Top Sellers Must Prove It Helped Their Businesses
Amazon Prime Day was a smash hit in terms of sales. Now, many brands must prove that two of their biggest sales days ever were, in fact, worth the cost.
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On Prime Day, Amazon Shows What A Content Fortress Can Really Do
It’s called “Prime Day” because you need a Prime, but the other definition of the word “prime” is rather apt. Amazon’s real superpower is its indivisibility.
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Why Bankers Misunderstand Ad Tech – And Why MediaMath Might Just Melt Away
When an ad tech company goes belly up – and its destiny is being decided by indifferent creditors – it becomes difficult for unfamiliar bankers to capture (or preserve) the value.