Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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TripleLift Announces Layoffs, The Latest In A Miserable Trend
TripleLift laid off one-fifth of its workforce on Thursday, which translates to more than 100 employees, AdExchanger has learned. The cuts only affect employees in the US and Canada. TripleLift confirmed the layoffs to AdExchanger. The company says it’s making this move as a course-correction after lower-than-expected growth. TripleLift invested heavily in company growth last […]
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This New Product Placement Startup Is Bridging The Gap Between Brands And Creators
Hopefully you aren’t sick of news headlines about generative AI technology in the ad industry just yet. On Tuesday, mar tech entrepreneur Omar Tawakol announced the public launch of Rembrand, a virtual product placement platform to monetize influencer and creator content.
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Acxiom Takes Its Data Broker Biz To The Cloud With Snowflake’s Help
Everyone’s got their head in the clouds: ad tech, media and even consumer data brokers. On Tuesday, Acxiom announced a data clean room service built on Snowflake that media and advertising companies can use to target and measure campaigns using their own first-party data sets and Acxiom’s consumer profiles. Data clean room services have existed […]
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How Ad Revenue Covertly Shaped Amazon And Apple’s Q4 Earnings
The Q4 online advertising rout hit Snap, Meta, Alphabet and others, but Amazon and Apple continue to gain ground.
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Alphabet’s Q4: Ad Spend Pullback Got Worse, With More Hurt To Come
Amazon and Apple reported Q4 and full-year 2022 earnings, and ad revenue has covertly become an important factor for both companies.
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How TheSoul Is Surfing The Waves Of Shorts, Commerce And Video Monetization
Video creators are in a period of “rapid experimentation,” said TheSoul VP of content distribution Victor Potrel. Some are pursuing commerce, some are getting into CTV and others are going all-in on short-form vertical video, where views counts are like monopoly money but the payouts are more like cents than dollars.
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The Big Story: Ad Tech, The DOJ And Apple Walk Into A Bar …
The big one is here, as The Big Story examines the DOJ’s suit against Google for anticompetitive practices. Also: The IAB pulls no punches in its criticisms of Apple.
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Will The Walled Gardens Turn Clean Room Tech Into Yet Another Platform Plaything?
Most data clean rooms pitch themselves as being interoperable – except for the biggest ones. And this leads to confusion. Whereas independent data clean rooms focus on interoperability, walled garden ad platforms have very little interest in it. And walled garden-based clean rooms are where the money goes, namely, Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH), the Amazon […]
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Ad Tech Is Actually Doing Better On Programmatic Transparency, Per ISBA Report
In 2020, UK-based advertising trade org ISBA and PwC found that publishers receive just 51% of ad spend and that 15% of ad spend can’t be attributed at all. The ISBA and PwC’s second programmatic transparency study, fortunately, shows ad tech and agency buyers have gotten the message.
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Why 2023 Is A Pivotal Year For Indie Data Clean Rooms
Clean rooms are all the rage – everybody’s talking about them. But even the most sophisticated brands are early in the test-and-learn phase, and mega-platforms with their own data clean rooms, including Google, Amazon and Meta, see the opportunity as well.
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IAB Europe Wins Belgian DPA Approval, But The TCF’S Fate Still Hangs In The Balance
Belgium’s data protection authority announced on Thursday that it has approved IAB Europe’s action plan, a six-month overhaul of the TCF, which was deemed illegal by the Belgian agency in February. But, a bit like in a triple-jump competition, this first hop only gets IAB Europe a small part of the distance it needs to travel.
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Microsoft Advertising Sets Its Sights On Retail Media
Microsoft Advertising is getting more serious about retail media. On Tuesday, Microsoft Advertising launched an off-site audience extension product and kicked off a testing phase for in-store activations.
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Geoffroy Martin, New Ogury CEO, Bets On Personified Over Personalized Ads
Geoffroy Martin was promoted to CEO of Ogury. Martin joined as COO a year ago, switching from Criteo to the newer French ad tech startup because he said he’s in tune with Ogury’s focus on planning campaigns without advertising IDs or third-party identity data.
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The Year Ahead In Antitrust For Big Tech In The US And Abroad
2023 is only a week in and antitrust scrutiny is already roiling the American big tech cadre. Important antitrust actions are looming, the line between antitrust regulation and privacy protection continues to blur – and large platforms with their own ad businesses are starting to feel the heat as regulators dig in.
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Why 2022 Was A Year Of Reckoning For Retail Media
In 2022, retail media grew to include practically any business with a first-party identity graph, purchase data and a claim to ears or eyeballs. Despite the buzz, however, retail media has a long way to go before the category is mature.
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AWS Clean Rooms Presage A New Era Of Cloud Infrastructure Taking Over Ad Tech
Cloud infrastructure technology services are converging on the media and ad tech industry. The sleeping giant is Amazon Web Services. And AWS has woken up.
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More Performance, Less Transparency: Inside Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Black Box
Meta Advantage+ is not a new streaming service, despite the “plus.” And it’s not a healthcare plan, though it sounds like one. It’s Meta’s version of a first-party data-based ad platform locked inside the blackest black box any Facebook advertiser has ever known.
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Meet Performance Max, The Blackest Black Box Of All Google Ad Products
Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media. Fast-forward to today, and Performance Max has quietly become the fastest growing and potentially most controversial product in the Google portfolio.
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AdQuick Joins The Growing Ranks Of DOOH DSPs
DOOH has been thought of as pure branding, according to Elliott Hasiuk, principal for digital media at Part and Sum. That makes sense, considering out-of-home media might just be a big picture of, say, a Big Mac and the McDonald’s arches plastered 40 feet in the air. “Now we’re able to tie that branding to bottom-of-the-funnel metrics that matter more to the business.”
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How The North Face Put A New Face On Its Marketing
Recently, when The North Face ran an RFP for a programmatic buying agency, it went with WITHIN, which also happens to be the performance agency that won its creative services RFP earlier this year. The agency restructuring reflects a broader change for The North Face’s marketing, says media VP Bethany Evans.
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AdExplainer: What You Need To Know About Device Fingerprinting
For more than a decade, the ad tech industry has tried to replace the term “fingerprinting” with euphemisms, like probabilistic modeling. But too bad for ad tech, because the term stuck.
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Thanksgiving Shopping Numbers Were Huge – But Did Retailers Benefit?
The Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday online shopping bonanza was in full effect this year. But it’s hard to make judgements about whether this season is helping buoy retailers and brands as in years past
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Why The Next Big Bet On Attribution May Be To … Spend Less On Attribution
Advertisers of all stripes are rethinking their ad measurement and attribution strategy. But the burst of new incrementality testing models, in-housing programs, multitouch attribution and media mix modeling efforts haven’t exactly led to a renaissance of understanding how measurement works.
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Twitch Throws Its Hat Into The Crowded Live Video Shopping Ring
Every major social network is trying to make livestream video shopping happen. And don’t count out the Amazon-owned game-streaming platform Twitch, which hosted its third “Pog Picks” live shopping event the days before Thanksgiving.
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Manscaped’s Message To Marketers: Embrace Complexity And Too Much Content
Founded in 2016, the male grooming company Manscaped started out primarily as a performance marketing engine. The products were simply a way for the brand to use its expertise in social media marketing and direct-to-consumer dynamics. Fast-forward six years, and Manscaped has broadened beyond one product and mobile performance marketing. In addition to launching a […]
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Walmart And Target Are Prepping For A Downturn
Walmart and Target each had a similar warning for investors when they reported earnings this week. The two major US retailers expect a modest Q4 and spoke of early signs that consumers are dramatically changing their shopping patterns (yet again).
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Ad Tech Stocks Rebound – But Can It Last?
Between Wednesday and Friday of last week, practically every independent ad tech company (The Trade Desk, Magnite, Criteo, Viant, System1, Tremor and PubMatic to name but a few) had a much-needed bump up in its share price. Can it last?
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How DraftKings And Amazon Prime Forge Streaming Sports Sponsorships
We’re halfway through the football season, but streaming sports is just kicking off. The Amazon Prime “Thursday Night Football” show began in September and it represents the first time that the NFL is streaming games without a linear broadcaster alongside.
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PODCAST: The Big Story
The Big Story: Wall Street Themes And Facebook Fee Schemes
Facebook’s ad platform is still misfiring and ad buyers are resorting to desperate measures, including a pay-for-access fee scheme that led to the firing of multiple Meta employees. Plus: It’s ad tech earnings week … and the category isn’t doing too hot.
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The Trade Desk Wins On Revenue In Q3, But Slips On Profit Margin
The Trade Desk’s revenue machine is still running strong. But with an economic downturn on the horizon, investors are pressing for TTD’s areas of optimism to translate into bottom line results.