Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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Uber Declares Its Destination-Based Targeting Is ‘Contextual’
Uber formally organized a new segment of the business called Uber Advertising on Wednesday. Uber also introduced a new ad offering called “journey ads” that allow brands to target Uber riders based on their destination.
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OpenAP Gets Investment From Advertising Outsider Snowflake
The data clean room category is like wet cement right now. And Snowflake is writing its name everywhere. On Monday, Snowflake announced an investment in OpenAP, an advertising identity data company co-owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
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Unilever’s Plan For Embracing Data-Driven Innovation
“When you enter those [agency] doors, you are you coming into an office of all media professionals – media planning, media strategy, custom content makers, research – where everybody eats, sleeps and breathes media,” said Aaron Sobol, Unilever’s head of media investment and partnerships. On the brand side, however, the in-house media team is comparatively small and sits “inside of a relatively small marketing community, inside of a very, very large company.”
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For Attribution, Retailers Test If Incrementality Can Be A New Truth Set
Multitouch attribution has fallen into disrepair. Facebook and Google platform attribution is a mess. User-level tracking is going the way of cigarette smoking during a pregnancy. So, what’s left for digital advertisers who need to bring performance measurement back to their media plans? Incrementality testing, it seems. “I was a little bit skeptical as to […]
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Gopuff’s New Ad Platform Is A Launching Pad For Creator Brands
Now that on-demand delivery service Gopuff has an ad platform business, it’s become an unlikely springboard to help creators promote and distribute their brand ventures.
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The W3C Ad Privacy Group Taking The Little-Engine-That-Could Path To Success
Almost one year ago, the W3C created a small sub-group called the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG). And, against the odds, the PATCG has made theoretical progress on a number of key ad tech and privacy logjams in the past year.
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Ad Buyers Bet On Programmatic In The Final Push Before The Midterms
The conventional wisdom in Washington DC is that half or more of political ad budgets during an election year are spent in the final 45 days before the election. We’ve rounded that final bend and are now in the home stretch to the midterms, and programmatic companies are like race horses chomping at their bits.
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The Big Story: Data Clean Rooms And Misleading Claims
Data clean rooms and regulation could be topics on The Big Story any week this year. But despite the tsunami of news coverage on both topics, each remains largely unknown or misunderstood.
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Snowflake Is Aggressively Pushing Into Mar Tech And Advertising
Roughly a year ago, Snowflake launched its Media Data Cloud, a suite of solutions built specifically to serve businesses with media and advertising needs. Fast forward 11 months, and Snowflake is spiking the football with a Data Cloud “world tour” to tout its offering.
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Programmatic Vet Bill Michels Joins Moloco, Since Retail Media Is The New Hotness
Bill Michels knows programmatic data. For the past couple years, he’s led The Trade Desk’s entire product group. Now, he’s headed to Moloco, where he’s starting as general manager of the company’s retail media business unit.
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TripAdvisor Built A Travel Media Biz Before Retail Media Took Off – And Now It's Got A Creative Studio, Too
“We realized that there was a whole universe of travel consumer that was applicable to a number of non-endemic categories as well,” said Adam Ochman, TripAdvisor’s global head of brand head of marketing solutions and co-leader of the new Wanderlab in-house creative studio.
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The Trade Desk Adds Salesforce To Its Roster Of CDP Partners For UID2
Salesforce quietly introduced a new app in its App Exchange on Wednesday that was developed by The Trade Desk as a way to convert CDP identity data to Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs. “The evolution of ad tech and martech is toward more and more first-party data being stored in cloud databases and in CDPs,” said Ben Sylvan, The Trade Desk’s GM of data partnerships.
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Connecting The Dots With Walmart Connect
Jeff Clark began at Walmart in 2017, before Walmart Connect was Walmart Connect, and before even Walmart Media Group prior to that. But whatever you call it, Walmart is homing in on a major opportunity in the booming retail media category. Clark, who’s now Walmart Connect VP of product, product marketing and analytics, is focused […]
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Walmart Connect Is Offering Closed-Loop Measurement on TikTok, Snapchat and Roku
Walmart Connect has gotten a lot more Connect-y of late. Now the retail media platform is striking partnerships to measure social commerce on TikTok and Snap, CTV ads on Roku and live-shopping content with companies Firework and TalkShopLive. The Walmart ad business has had bursts of new partners since it settled on The Trade Desk […]
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The DOJ Antitrust Enforcer Says No More Easy Vertical Mergers For Digital Platforms
Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Department of Justice Antitrust Division, is pressing a tougher interpretation of American antitrust law to meet the requirements of a new digital economy. “We have all seen that in digital markets, monopolies self-sustain,” he said.
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Not Creating Vertical Video Yet? YouTube Is Doing It For You
Vertical video won the user-generated content wars long ago. If you see someone filming with their phone in landscape, they probably have a hotmail email address, too. Snapchat and Instagram may have shifted the way most people (or at least, most young people) take photos and videos, but it took TikTok to shift the way YouTube and its advertiser base use the Google platform.
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Merkle Is Riding The Retail Media Network Craze (With Its Eye On The Next Big Thing)
Merkle’s retail and consumer goods group has become a testbed for multiple other verticals. Although people tend to think of retail advertising from the perspective of grocery store chains and major CPG brands (Walmart, Target, Kroger and the brands they carry), these days the “retail media” category includes a host of new entrant: Best Buy, Marriott, Lyft, Uber, craft goods store Michael’s.
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Kroger Adds CTV Inventory To Its Retail Media Offering
Kroger Precision Marketing, the grocer’s advertising and data business, announced an expansion into CTV and video inventory channels. “It’s critical to … move into these channels that are increasing with respect to where advertisers are investing their dollars,” Kroger SVP Cara Pratt told AdExchanger.
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The TCF’s Future Will Be Decided By The EU’s High Court
IAB Europe’s litigation with Belgium’s data protection authority (DPA), which began in February with a ruling over the legality of IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF), will drag on for another year at least. This week the Belgian appeals court deferred specific questions in the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The appeals court will not deliberate until these questions are answered.
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The Rise Of 'TikTokalytics' Startups
Call it the rise of TikTokalytics. A group of young attribution and analytics startups, the newest wielding particular talent on TikTok, have inherited the Earth from multi-touch attribution (MTA) companies.