Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Google Chief Measurement Strategist Pens Converted: A How-To For Adopting Lifetime Value Metrics
It’s a familiar story – He picked up a new pandemic hobby, while finding pockets of time away from small children. For Neil Hoyne, Google chief measurement strategist, being stuck at home meant writing a book. Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts, was published last month. “The single lesson that pulls through here is that a lot of these changes are easier for companies to realize then what they may suspect.”
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How Wine Access Fled Old Media Tactics And Chased Consumers Into The Subscription Economy
Wine Access has evolved in lockstep with the internet and changing consumer habits. In 2006, it started operating ecommerce domains for wine publications and vineyards. Because it sends email follow-ups on behalf of wine sellers, Wine Access became an early email database with daily newsletter content and special offers. The company also started producing stories and content about its vineyard customers and wines, which generated cookies and publisher data. In 2017, it launched its own online store. Over the past two years, the company has been surfing the next major wave of the digital economy: the great subscription boom.
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Microsoft Ads Chief Rob Wilk On Why Advertising Is The Company’s ‘Newfound Religion’
Microsoft is the multitrillion-dollar advertising company that nobody saw coming. There’s a reason for that. Until recent, Microsoft was a distant and relatively uninvested competitor in the advertising sector. The company didn’t have ad tech, exactly, and its own properties – MSN, the Bing search engine and the Edge browser – never gained marketer mindshare. But that’s going to change, said Rob Wilk, who took over as head of Microsoft Advertising in January.
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Integral Ad Science Reports 34% Annual Growth, With CTV Ambitions (But Programmatic Gains)
Integral Ad Science is chasing two shiny trends – contextual targeting and connected TV – as the company charts a course in digital measurement and ad verification. The growth plan has generated, well, growth. IAS earned $323.5 million last year, up by more than a third from 2020, the company reported in its quarterly earnings report on Thursday. Though Integral’s net loss grew year-over-year as well, from $32 million to $52 million.
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PODCAST: The Big StoryThe Big Story – The War In Ukraine
This week, there’s only one big story: the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine. The worlds of media, marketing and technology are reckoning with their role in a time of war. Difficult theoretical questions of content moderation and information access are all of a sudden not-so-theoretical and advertisers, too, must consider their role.
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LiveRamp And The Trade Desk Launch An EU-Specific ID – And Call For An End To Programmatic ‘Infighting’
The ad tech industry has been held back for years over what Trade Desk CEO and Founder Jeff Green called “infighting” between independent programmatic companies, rather than a spirit of open collaboration. Green made his remarks on Monday, speaking at LiveRamp’s RampUp conference in San Francisco. “There’s always been a fear among the open internet and what was once called the Lumascape, where everyone’s afraid of the other logos on the screen.”
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Why Amazon Aggregator Thrasio Is Sticking With Ecommerce-Native Experts Over Legacy Vendors
If you aren’t plugged into Amazon news, you may not know about Thrasio. But it’s one of the biggest Amazon brand aggregators. And it’s looking for more ways data sources and data vendors that can assemble a picture for new acquisitions or ways to grow the current portfolio through advertising and analytics.
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Verisk Buys Infutor For $225 Million To Add Marketing Services To Consumer Data Business
Everyone and their mother is becoming an advertising company. And that trend took another step forward on Thursday with the news that Verisk, a consumer data provider for insurance, lenders and financial services, acquired the identity resolution company Infutor for $225 million.
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Walmart Breaks Out Ad Business Revenue At $2.1 Billion And Details How Ads Power Its Retail Evolution
Walmart went further than it ever has in support of its advertising business when the retail big kahuna reported earnings on Thursday. The company broke out advertising revenue for the first time, with Walmart clearing $2.1 billion worldwide. $500 million of that total was credited as revenue earned as a reduction to an advertiser’s cost of sales (make of that what you will). The other $1.6 billion was pure media biz.
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The Trade Desk Hits A Billion-Dollar Run Rate And Explains Why It Ditched Google Open Bidding
The Trade Desk started flexing its scale muscles around two years ago, leaving other independent DSPs behind in terms of what it invests in QPS data (queries per second, which become a major cost factor when a company bids on billions of impressions) and pushing back on IAB solutions that gave preferential treatment to Google products. Now a billion-dollar annual business, The Trade Desk has become an even more assertive player in the media landscape.
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Google And IAB Europe Are Losing Data Privacy Lawsuits In The EU, But What Does It Mean?
Legal and court losses are piling up across Europe for American ad tech companies – and for Google. Turns out navigating the GDPR and last year’s Schrems II decision, which invalidated Privacy Shield, the former data-sharing agreement between the US and the EU, is far from straightforward. In January, the Austrian data protection authority (DPA) […]
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Mozilla And Meta Submit (Yet Another) Privacy Ad Tech Proposal In New W3C Group
The first meeting of the W3C Private Advertising Technology Group (PATCG) took place this week, bringing together the biggest American browser and tech companies. One important new item on the agenda is called Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), a joint proposal by Mozilla and Meta engineers. If adopted, it would improve cross-device or cross-browser attribution tracking without tripping any of Apple or browser-based privacy policies. That’s a big “if” though. And, even optimistically, could take years to ship.
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The Big Story: There’s Nothing But Green Pasture For Video Game Ads … For SSPs, Not So Much
Activision-Blizzard, ZeniMax Media, Bungie, Zynga, MoPub, Adjust, Glu Mobile: Each multi-billion acquisition happened in the past year, as creative game developers and the ad tech businesses that monetize their apps come together. Plus: What’s new in the SSP market? Google’s iron grip on the category is strong as ever, but there’s room for growth.
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LiveRamp Sets A Course To Cruise On Data Clean Room And Retail Media Tailwinds
LiveRamp earned a total of $141 million in Q4 2021, up 17% from the same period in 2020, with the retail category powering the company’s performance during the year. But LiveRamp isn’t turning a profit. The company reported gross profit of $102 million in 2021, but gross profit comes before costs and expenses, which mean […]
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The App Store Is ‘An Economic Miracle’ – But For Apple, Not Developers
Apple and third-party developers have grown so far apart, it’s difficult to tell when they’re talking about the same mobile app ecosystem. In 2021, Apple’s Services business earned $72 billion, making it big enough to be a Fortune 50 company in its own right, said Apple CFO Luca Maestri on the company earnings call.
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Amazon Breaks Out Advertising Services (At Last) – On A $31 Billion Run Rate
Advertising has finally made it. Out of the Amazon “Other” category, that is. And it was about time, considering Amazon’s ad business earned $31.2 billion in 2021, the company reported during its quarterly earnings call on Thursday.
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The TCF – IAB Europe’s GDPR Workaround – Got Shot Down By Belgium’s DPA, With Six Months To Fix It
The programmatic industry just took the toughest body blow it’s felt since the GDPR became law in 2018. The Belgian Data Protection Authority (DPA) announced on Wednesday that IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the industry solution for conveying consent data in the programmatic auction, is illegal in its current form. The DPA also fined IAB Europe $280,000 and ordered the trade organization to appoint a data protection officer (which could end up costing more than the fine).
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Alphabet Smashes Ad Revenue Record On The Strength Of Commerce, Cloud And CTV
Five years ago, before GDPR, before TikTok was TikTok and before Google was Alphabet, Google reported Q4 2016 earnings of $26 billion. On Tuesday, the company reported $75.3 billion in total Q4 2021 revenues.
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Why B2B Monday.com Is Buying A Super Bowl Ad (And How It’s Measuring The Impact)
The Monday after the Super Bowl is a big day for marketers, as people kick around their favorite ads from the game. This year, the Monday after will be especially important for monday.com, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based workforce app development platform. The B2B company bought a Super Bowl sponsorship in a space more often associated […]
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Instacart Adds Display Ad Units As It Boosts Its Programmatic Supply
Advertising can be cheap. But acquiring new users is almost always expensive. Which is why the Instacart ads team is focused on creating new advertising opportunities to reach the customers it already has. On Wednesday, the company introduced its first display ad units, as well as branded pages that serve as the hub for CPG […]
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Why LiveRamp Is Banking On Google Cloud For Its Next Growth Spurt
Ad tech companies once gained market share through optimization bake-offs, in agency conference rooms and on the beaches of Cannes. Now, wins come from the cloud. “The cloud and first-party data are exploding right now,” said James Arra, LiveRamp’s head of cloud partnerships. That’s why LiveRamp has forged a strategic relationship with Google Cloud Platform […]
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The DOJ And FTC’s New Antitrust Heads Plan To Overhaul M&A Review (Someday)
The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced a joint effort to rewrite US antitrust law for handling mergers and acquisitions. Don’t hold your breath, though The two agencies are opening a 60-day public comment period for individuals, companies and organizations to submit concerns about M&A and antitrust regulation. That material will […]
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The Future Of Retail Media Platforms Will Split From Walled Gardens, Says IRI’s Pelino
The retail media craze kicked into hyperdrive in the past year. Because of the pandemic, the number of people ordering groceries online for the first time skyrocketed, but the trend was already underway. The rush of retailers into the programmatic platform business meant they tended to follow the playbook laid out by the by the […]
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T-Mobile Acquires Octopus Interactive And Says It’s Still Committed To Ad Tech
It’s become a familiar tale over the years: a major telco makes a big investment in ad tech followed by buyer’s remorse. AT&T and Verizon offloaded their respective ad tech stacks, Singtel is reportedly looking to divest Amobee and Telenor sold Tapad. But T-Mobile is defying the trend. On Monday, T-Mobile Marketing Solutions, its ad […]
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Here’s How Instacart Plans To Become A Major Ad Platform
Instacart is at the forefront of a movement among data-driven companies over the past two years to launch ancillary ad platform businesses, including direct competitors like GoPuff, partner competitors like Kroger and unrelated product or payment companies. The sailing hasn’t always been smooth, but the company is committed to building a major ad tech business.
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Big News In Ad Fraud Land, As Human Raises $100 Million And IAS Makes Another Acquisition
2021 was a scorching year for the ad fraud and verification category – and 2022 is keeping up the pace. Last year, both Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify IPO’d and went on to acquire multiple startups apiece off the back of their multibillion-dollar market caps. Human, formerly White Ops, meanwhile, was acquired by three investment […]
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Where Big Tech Advertising Businesses Stand At The End Of A Crazy 2021
The biggest US tech companies – Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft – are often lumped together. But their ad platform businesses have distinct dynamics, and each was affected by the trials and tribulations of 2021 in very different ways. Although Apple’s privacy changes took a knife to Facebook and a hammer to Google, for example, […]
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How M&A Waves Reshaped Programmatic Media In 2021
The past year may have seemed like 2020 redux. But in programmatic media, 2021 has brought a world of change. Ad tech and mobile marketing companies flooded the stock exchange, and already-public companies, including Magnite, Digital Turbine and Media and Games Invest (MGI), which owns the ad tech business Verve Group, have become active consolidators. […]
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Campbell Soup’s New Sales Transformation VP On Testing Instacart’s Free Sample Ad Pilot
When customers walk down a grocery aisle from Thanksgiving through the December holidays, they’re surrounded by Campbell’s products: soup cans and broth accompanied by in-store displays and sales tags. When walking the grocery aisle means breezing a mobile feed of online grocery items and 10-foot-long shelves are squashed into a phone screen, how does a […]
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Xandr, Formerly AppNexus, Is Now Formerly AT&T, After Its Acquisition By Microsoft
AT&T has sold its ad tech business Xandr to Microsoft. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition marks the end of a painful and unsuccessful run for the one-time leader of the programmatic industry, AppNexus, which was rebranded Xandr but never found a home within the AT&T organization. Former AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson […]