Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Why Meta Pins Its Hopes To Payments
It’s not hard to understand why Meta is prioritizing ecommerce advertising with Advantage+ Shopping campaigns, Shops and Checkout on Facebook and Instagram. Meta must reignite its overall advertising business.
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A Clean Room That Works With And Across Clouds? Call It Snowflake’s Chance In Hell
The data clean room category can be split into walled garden giants – Google, Amazon and Meta – and independent operators, such as Habu, InfoSum and Optable. But that simple distinction misses an important player in the clean room market: Snowflake.
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Etsy And eBay Pin Their Turnaround Hopes On Ad Business Growth
The retail media boom isn’t just for Amazon and brick-and-mortar chains. Online marketplaces are also investing heavily in ad platform businesses, albeit for different reasons. Etsy and eBay, two of the most prominent non-Amazon online marketplaces, both reported 2022 year-end earnings on Wednesday – and both framed advertising as a fast-growing revenue pillar with important implications […]
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Why Shopify Audiences Is The Retail Media Player To Watch In 2023
This week, we dive into Shopify, and its potential as a uniquely positioned purchase data supplier to the advertising industry with a product called Shopify Audiences.
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Walmart Ad Revenue Grew 30% To $2.7 Billion in 2022, And Is Buoying Its Profit Margin
Walmart had a mixed day with investors following its earnings call. But the Walmart Connect advertising business was a bright spot, with growth of 30% YoY to $.7 billion in 2022.
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The Fresh Market Adds Live-Video Shopping As Advertiser Demand Pushes Into Publishing
Three years after launching a retail media network, specialty food retailer The Fresh Market has a print magazine and a new live-stream shopping program.
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The First Edition Of AdExchanger’s Commerce Newsletter, And We Go For Max Effect
Hey! This is James Hercher, AdExchanger’s senior editor and commerce industry beat reporter. Welcome to the inaugural dispatch of AdExchanger’s Commerce Newsletter.
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The Trade Desk Defies Industry Trends, Touting UID2 And OpenPath Success
While other ad platforms, including Google and Meta, saw spend declines, The Trade Desk beat the ad market again by growing 24% year over year in Q4.
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The Royal Rumble Is On For Who Wins Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising isn’t the privacy-safe panacea everyone thinks it is. As user-level IDs diminish on the web and in apps, publishers and ad tech companies are fighting over what “contextual advertising” even means and who has the right to serve contextual placements.
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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.