James Hercher
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
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James Hercher
Articles By James Hercher
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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.
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More DTC Agency Execs And Consultants Are Giving ‘Brand Operator’ A Try
Hey, readers! This is James Hercher, AdExchanger’s senior editor and your escort into the world of commerce media. This week, we examine an interesting DTC marketing trend whereby online brand building and ecommerce advertising experts are testing their mettle by launching and operating brands of their own. They’re eating their own dog food, so to […]
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Rakuten Advertising Launches An Affiliate-Inspired Take On Publisher First-Party Data Tech
Rakuten Advertising announced the launch of Audience Engine, a CRM onboarding and optimization product that treats affiliate more like search and social media.
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Amazon Is The Latest Major Ad Platform Going All-In On Machine Learning Tech
The new hot trend in platform advertising is to put the machines in charge of everything. It’s true of Google, true of Meta and, even more so as of this week, it’s true of Amazon.
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How Brand Power Leads To Pricing Power
Hey readers! This is James Hercher, with the latest AdExchanger Commerce dispatch. This week, we’ll highlight a few recent CPG earnings reports, during which legacy food and beverage brands appear more optimistic about their staying power than their startup competitors.
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This Is What Caused Meta’s Overspending Glitch
Meta’s latest ad platform glitch is complicated because it involves an understanding of the minutiae of how the ad platform is used.
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Meta Has Lost The Pulse Of Its Customer Base As Automation Replaces Human Services
Meta advertisers and the Meta ad platform are still dealing with the fallout from Sunday’s campaign overspending error.
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More Than A Bug? Major System Error Causes Heavy Overspending On Meta Platforms
Hope you had a peaceful Sunday. If you’re a Facebook advertiser, though, that may not have been the case. A bug or error in Meta’s ad system caused campaigns to overspend by more than double their daily spending cap during the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, according to numerous complaints on Twitter, LinkedIn […]
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This Ad Tech Vet Wrote A Book About Precision Data For The General Public
If you don’t know how data products works, but want to understand how data operates in your life an changes social systems, ask the people who do know. Madeleine Want, VP of data for Fanatics Betting and Gaming, has a data product background spanning diverse web and app services. She was Index Exchange’s senior director […]
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Why Data-Driven DTC Ad Buyers Need Creative Types (And DTC Twitter) To Get By
Motion raised $6 million this week and is riding a wave of creative-focused martech, such as Memorable AI raising $2.5 million last October and ad tech vet Omar Tawakol launching Rembrand in February.
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Google Ads Tested Its Privacy-Focused Tech … And The Results Are Meh
How well does Google’s replacement tech for third-party cookies work? So, so (so far), at least based on the results of a recent Google Ads experiment designed to isolate the contribution of the Topics API, first-party publisher IDs and contextual data.
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Big Hopes, Big Backers And A Big Mountain To Climb For Email Data Startup Lockr
A group of martech funds and individual angel investors backed lockr, an online identity management company with B2B and consumer-facing products, to the tune of $2.5 million.
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The Home Depot’s Path To Becoming A Global Advertising Player
Melanie Babcock has been at The Home Depot for almost 10 years, starting in marketing. But, recently, she was made VP of Retail Media+ and monetization in February, with her responsibilities shifting to focus entirely on the revenue-generating ad business.
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Brave Software Prepares For Its Next Challenge: Advertising
Brave Software, which makes the eponymous browser and search engine, is taking the next step by opening a self-serve ad platform option.
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How A Minor Apple WebKit Tweak Can Send Ripples (Or Trigger Tsunamis) Across Marketing Tech
Whenever the butterflies at Apple WebKit flap their wings, “Ad Tech Island” feels the aftershocks. Last week, a small change to Apple’s on-device tech to patrol third-party data collectors sent some mobile and online advertising practitioners into a tizzy over the loss of another sliver of data transparency. They also fret because Apple continues to […]
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The Great SaaS Unbundling Is Here For Retail And Ecommerce
The phrase “subscription fatigue” typically applies to consumers tiring of the ever-growing number of media and entertainment packages. But subscription fatigue could also describe how DTC and ecommerce brands feel about their SaaS costs and vendor rosters.
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With Dread, Advertisers Report A Wave Of Mistaken Google Account Suspensions And AI Miscues
In the past week or so, many Google advertiser accounts have been suspended for the first time, and erroneous suspensions and other account issues have increased at an alarming rate, five agency buyers told AdExchanger.
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What’s Actually Going On Behind Retail Media Network Walls?
American retailers now see themselves as media companies. But in their publisher guise, retailers are in a strange and giddy situation.
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Symbiosys Pitches A New Collaborative Bidding Model For Retail Search And Social
Retail media networks have been adding ad tech audience extensions for the open web and CTV. Now, new startup Symbiosys wants to take retail ad platforms a step further into search and social.