Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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 StoryThe 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.
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Meta’s Ad Platform Glitches Spur Q4 Angst – And A Customer Service Fee Scheme
The Facebook advertising platform has been beset by glitches and miscues all year. But advertisers who hoped that the bugginess would sort itself out by the holiday season are only discovering coal in their stockings.
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Investors Push Roku For More Open Programmatic To Deal With Ad Spend Pullbacks
The third quarter wasn’t a good one for Roku, which shared belt-tightening plans in expectation of worse results to come during the all-important upcoming holiday season. That’s what happens when advertisers get nervous and hit the brakes.
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Why Ecommerce Brands See Live Video As Their Way Around The Old Retail Model
If you think of livestream shopping in the US as a revolution, it’s a dud. But if you view it as a livestream shopping evolution, real progress is being made.
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Ocean Spray Embraces Fragmentation With Its Holiday Campaigns
Ocean Spray is assembling its cross-channel campaigns for the holiday season – and just producing and managing the video assets alone requires Santa’s Workshop-levels of effort and cross-team collaboration. But fragmentation is both a challenge and opportunity, according to Melanie DiBiasio, the brand’s associate director of media and martech.
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksStraight Talk With An Anonymous Guest, The Legendary Corndog Of Ad Tech Twitter
Call it a Halloween special. Our apparition of a guest this week, an anonymous ad tech Twitter personality, is staying beneath the invisibility cloak. “I’m not senior enough to get away with running my mouth,” says the @HumanPropensity account operator who goes by corndog.
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Criteo Reports A Revenue Drop But Still Upbeat On Retail Media
The ad tech hits keep coming this earnings season. The latest is Criteo, which reported total revenue of $446.9 million in Q3 2022, down from $508.6 million last year, while net profit in Q3 dropped from $24.2 million in 2021 to $6.5 million.
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What Deadline? Google Analytics Pushes Back Universal Analytics Sunset
Google Analytics began 2022 with an important goal to migrate its entire customer base onto Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Universal Analytics (UA), the longtime baseline analytics service, was to sunset by October 2023. UA was set for shutdown next year, but Google Analytics announced on Thursday that the company will push that deadline to July 2024.
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Alphabet Sees First Annual Drop In YouTube Ad Revenue And Girds For Further Losses
The Alphabet C-suite faced a tougher grilling than usual during its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday. YouTube had a YoY decline in revenue for the first time since Alphabet started disclosing YouTube ad revenue two and a half years ago – and likely for the first time ever since YouTube was acquired.
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Amazon Is Leaning On Its Data Clean Room To Spur Ad Tech Growth
The Amazon Marketing Cloud, which emerged from beta last year, is at the beating heart of Amazon’s advertising ambitions. Amazon touted the product, which is its answer to a homegrown data clean room, at its Amazon Ads unBoxed conference in New York City on Wednesday.
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Memorable AI Raises $2.75 Million With A New Take On Creative Testing
Ad analytics startups have been springing up lately. The latest example is Memorable AI, a creative testing startup that raised $2.75 million earlier this month, including stakes from MediaLink CEO Michael Kassan and from programmatic vet Brian O’Kelley.
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P&G Is Slashing Marketing Spend As It Goes All-In On The Reach Metric
Reach for the stars: That’s the lesson from Procter & Gamble’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday. Its new measurement approach, which is oriented around the reach metric, is behind a reduction in media spend.