Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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Can We Un-Hack Growth Marketing?
“Performance marketing and growth hacking ruined a generation of startups,” according to Rent the Runway co-founder and CEO Jennifer Hyman.
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IAB Tech Lab Blesses Its First Set Of Data Clean Room Specs
The IAB Tech Lab released its first data clean room guidance and also shared the first version of the Open Private Join and Activation (OPJA) specifications, which sets use cases to match encrypted audiences.
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Machine Learning Will Eat Ad Budgets, But Who Gets The Bellyache?
Machine learning tech is consuming open web ad budgets as big walled gardens consolidate media, data, tech and audiences inside their own fortresses.
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Microsoft Is Deprioritizing Third-Party Ad Tech Amid Reorgs And Layoffs
Microsoft’s purchase of Xandr from AT&T in late 2021 might have looked like an embrace of third-party ad tech. But while parts of the Xandr tech are considered valuable by Microsoft, the future of Xandr as an SSP integrated with thousands of outside publishers is in doubt.
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Every Killer Brand Starts With A Great Name
What’s in a name? Quite a lot, says David Placek, founder and CEO of Lexicon Branding, which specializes in inventing product names, including Dasani, Swiffer, Impossible Burger and Febreze, to name just a few.
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Macy’s Dives Into Open Programmatic, Names The Trade Desk As Its First DSP Partner
Macy’s, the largest department store chain in the US, announced a partnership with The Trade Desk for self-serve advertising powered by Macy’s data.
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How Meta Has (Or Hasn’t) Responded To A Major Account Overspend Error Two Weeks Later
In direct communications, Meta account reps candidly admit the platform had an “error” or “bug” and commit to at least partial refunds. But the company has tried to elide its account overspend glitch.