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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RoC Skincare’s Commerce Marketing Strategy Goes More Than Skin Deep
DTC brands are struggling to get by without the Facebook ad engine. Legacy brands are flummoxed by ecommerce. One company that’s hoping to split the difference is RoC Skincare, which spun out of Johnson & Johnson and was acquired by the private equity firm Gryphon in 2018.
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Disney Integrates With The Trade Desk And UID2 In Pursuit Of Better Addressability
If addressable ad IDs are the new keys to the kingdom, then you’ll find The Trade Desk at Epcot this summer. Which is to say, Disney and The Trade Desk announced an identity integration on Tuesday that will allow advertisers to activate against Disney’s first-party data programmatically via its clean room data product using Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) IDs.
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How Carter’s Juggles A Marketing Measurement Overhaul
There’s a disconnect between those ad buyers in the trenches of online advertising and their own corporate leaders up the C-suite, who are accustomed to determining marketing group budgets based on ROI and other basic advertising KPIs that, frankly, are going haywire right now. One way to deal with that disconnect is to add someone who speaks both languages, as it were.
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PODCAST: The Big StoryThe Big Story: The Summer Of Bummer
The overturn of Roe v. Wade, the ongoing war in Ukraine, a stock market collapse – it’s all the news that’s fit to print, but how are publishers going to monetize it if brands are skittish about serious topics? Plus: The dangers of data collection in a post-Roe world.
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Pinterest Leans Further Into Commerce Advertising With New Features And Shopping API
Commerce and creator monetization are Pinterest’s two main priorities right now, said Jeremy King, the company’s SVP and head of engineering. King, who is also the former CTO of Walmart’s ecommerce business – he joined Pinterest in 2019 – said that the convergence of creator revenue potential with social media-based shopping and product discovery by consumers “will make Pinterest functional, versus purely inspirational.”
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Why Simple Modern, An Amazon-Native Brand, Ditched The Amazon Ad Platform (For Now)
“We saw the rise and fall that can happen if you’re dependent on digital advertising,” said Bryan Porter, Simple Modern’s co-founder and chief ecommerce officer. “It worked really well for us … until it didn’t.” The experience of surfing an online ad wave and then crashing hard on the beach has shaped Simple Modern’s marketing strategy, which is fully in-housed
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Universal Music Makes Its Data-Driven Ad Platform Play
The parade of data-driven ad platform launches by companies that don’t traditionally monetize through advertising seemingly cannot be stopped. The latest example is Universal Music Group (UMG), a top music label which last week launched its data-driven ad-targeting platform called the UMusic Media Network.
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PODCAST: The Big Story
The Big Story: Google Wrestles With An Analytics Overhaul, While The Ad Tech Market Preps For A Downturn
Google has tried – and so far mostly failed – to get its customers on board with major new migrations for its online advertising platform. But Google means business this time, with the migration to the new GA4 analytics solution. You’ve got one year. Also: Tech layoffs are on the rise.
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Nike Touts Its DTC And Data-Hungry Wholesale Deals In Upbeat Q2 Earnings
Two years ago, shortly after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Nike doubled down on what it refers to as its Consumer Direct Acceleration. Nike wasn’t simply weathering a storm, but taking COVID-19’s worldwide shakeup of consumer buying habits as an opportunity to rethink its business “by expanding our digital advantage, reshaping the marketplace of the future and creating deeper, more direct consumer relationships,” CFO Matthew Friend told investors.
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Marketers Have One Year To Migrate To The New Google Analytics – But It’s Already A Mess
In nature, animals migrate. Elephants, birds, turtles – by some combination of memory, instinct and intuition, creatures in the wild know to make the same epic voyage every year. But how did they make the first great migration? If anyone figures that out, let Google know. It’s struggling to get marketers on board with a major analytics migration set for next year.
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Why The Grocery Chain Albertsons In-Housed Its Retail Media Network And What It Plans To Do Next
The grocery chain Albertsons in-housed its advertising services and tech business in February, and is still making big changes to the group. “It’s really about owning the tech stack and the product vision,” said Evan Hovorka, head of retail media products.
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T-Mobile Rebrands Its Ad Biz And Navigates The Perilous Line Between Programmatic And Privacy
T-Mobile is sharpening its programmatic sales pitch and releasing new ad platform features this week. One cosmetic adjustment: The ad revenue group’s name is changing from T-Mobile Marketing Solutions to T-Mobile Advertising. But T-Mobile has also launched App Insights, an app-based analytics platform that’s been in beta for the past year.
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Why Sam’s Club’s Media Biz Rebranded From Advertising To ‘Member Access’
Sam’s Club, the membership-based retailer owned by Walmart, recently rebranded its advertising business as the Member Access Platform (MAP) as it charts its own course alongside other emerging retail media platforms. The notion of “member access” is what sets Sam’s Club apart from other retailers that are focused entirely on advertising as a way to monetize customers, said Lex Josephs, a VP at Sam’s Club and GM of the MAP business.
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Hard Rock Brings A Cost-Conscious Mindset To The Hard-Charging Sports Betting App Market
Legalized sports gambling is flooding the market with betting apps, which are becoming powerhouse spenders as they seek to gain a foothold. Some betting apps put crazy-high premiums on new users that they hope to make up in lifetime customer (gambler) value, but they’re not all in a grow-now mode regardless of costs.
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Marriott’s Ad Sales Leader On Building A Travel Media Network (Don’t Call it Retail Media)
Marriott is one among a platoon of non-advertising companies that have launched programmatic ad platforms lately. Just don’t call Marriott’s new platform a retail media network. “I wouldn’t put us in that category,” said Elizabeth Donovan, global director and head of ad revenue for the Marriott Media Network. “We are a travel media network and I think more like a publisher, too.”
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksCatching Up With Dr. Johnny Ryan On How Ad Tech Can Change So Much – And Also Not At All
For years, data privacy regulators didn’t have the tools – or the teeth – they needed to effectively enforce proper standards on the internet. Then came GDPR. Now they have the tools and the teeth. But, still, privacy enforcers are mostly unable to disrupt the status quo. At least to hear Johnny Ryan tell the story on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
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Volta Charges Up Its Ad Business As Retailer Media Networks Hit Their Stride
Mike Schott joined Volta, which makes electric car charging stations, almost six years ago to build out the company’s nascent advertising business. That makes Volta early to the everything-is-an-ad platform trend. But even back in 2016, Schott, a longtime EV owner himself with a background in ad tech – he’s the former VP of sales for DSP Viant – had the sense that “an advertising business would be a strong differentiator.”
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Web Standards Orgs Call Out For Help As They (And Online Ad Revenue) Are Swamped By Change
Three web standards organizations tasked with the online ad industry overhaul, the W3C, the IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org, called out for help this week during a series of presentations and a joint panel at the AdMonsters Ops conference in New York City.
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European Baby Brand Bugaboo Makes Its First US-Focused Social Media And Content Play
Jeanelle Teves lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the sidewalks are jammed with UPPAbaby strollers. And now it’s her job as general manager of Amsterdam-based baby gear company Bugaboo’s North America business to expand the challenger brand’s presence stateside and into Canada. Teves joined Bugaboo a year ago following a long stint […]
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The Programmatic Prognosticator Who Sees The Tide Turning From Walled Gardens To The Open Web
The investment bank Needham estimates that Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Disney combined will grab around $650 billion of ad dollars in 2023. By comparison, The Trade Desk earned just $1.2 billion in 2021, its first time clearing the billion-dollar mark in a single year, and even the strongest programmatic companies earn in the hundreds of millions, which is peanuts by walled garden standards. But “what that means is that a tiny 1% or 2% shift in budgets from the big platforms could double or even triple.”
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PODCAST: The Big Story
The Big Story: Frontline Reporting From The TV And Podcast Upfronts
The NewFronts are old news. Now it’s all about the upfronts, which are old. But don’t forget about the podcast upfronts, which are newer than the NewFronts but named after the TV oldfronts … or upfronts. Okay. Now that we’ve cleared that up, tune in for frontline reporting from the upfronts (TV and podcast varieties).
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Google Unveils New Shopping Ad Formats And Packs More Demand Into Performance Max
Google announced the latest updates to its shopping ad products at Google Marketing Live on Tuesday, with changes on the backend to how advertisers use its tech and on the consumer side. These changes are becoming more necessary as the mobile Google Search feed evolves from primarily text-based responses to more visual elements on the […]
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Why This Server Company Launched Its First Ad Product – And Why It Won’t Be The Last
Edgemesh Server, a commerce-based site and server operator, launched its first solution targeted at the ad industry this month to help commerce companies identify and root out bots and automated traffic that trigger valueless ad clicks. Edgemesh is one of several new cloud and mar tech solutions that see programmatic advertising and commerce as a growth opportunity, but aren’t wading into ad tech themselves.
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Brands Lean On New Attribution Tech – Just Don’t Call It MTA – As Budgets Split To New Channels
A rose by any name will smell as sweet, sure. But attribution by any name doesn’t work the same. Call it what you want, the problem of channel-based incremental testing is important. Measured raised $21 million last week, as it expands in the post-attribution attribution category, alongside other startups like Triple Whale, which raised $24 million a month ago, and Northbeam.
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The Pivot To AVOD Is Happening And The Trade Desk Is Here For It
Jeff Green, Founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, has been spiking the football lately in earnings reports, as some of his long-held predictions have come to fruition. First, there was Google’s delay of third-party cookie deprecation, which seemed like a bold bet when he first predicted Google wouldn’t remove third-party cookies by the initial deadline. This quarter, it was Netflix who delivered.
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How TikTok’s Ad Platform Stands After A Half Year Of Whirlwind Growth And New Products
Seven months ago, TikTok surpassed one billion worldwide users, breaking into a club that previously consisted only of Google and Facebook apps. Since then, TikTok has been on a massive ad platform expansion campaign as it tries to both follow in the footsteps of apps like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and differentiate itself from the old guard of the billion-strong walled gardens.
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AdExplainer: The Evolution Of Retail Media
Retail media is the hottest thing in online advertising and one of the most important categories for the future of programmatic growth. And the most important thing about retail media 2.0, a catchall for retailers using first-party data to target and monetize their audiences, is that the real value doesn’t come from the inventory or even who’s making the buy. It’s all about the data.
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PODCAST: The Big Story
The Big Story: NewFronts Week Means Galas And Shiny New TV Tech – But The War In Ukraine Reveals A Grittier Side Of Advertising
It’s NewFronts season. A week of programmatic pageantry where the data-driven video and streaming media ecosystem plays dress up in an attempt to recreate the glitz and glamour of the age-old TV upfronts. But across the Atlantic, the industry is hard at work dealing with the harsh realities of the online era as advertising becomes a means of “psychological warfare.”
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Facebook Advertisers Are Itching For Change As Bugs Infest Its Attribution Tech
Facebook marketer Rok Hladnik awoke last Thursday to discover that more than half of the 140 Facebook ad accounts he operates had been randomly turned off. The week before, the campaigns were overspending in the wee hours of the morning, when they should have been dormant. 2021 was the year of the cicada swarms in the US. But the bugs have come for the metaverse this year, apparently.
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Amazon Sales And Profits Slip, But Advertising Powers Along
Amazon disappointed investors with a $3.8 billion net loss in Q1 this year, its first quarterly loss in the past six years, plus online sales ticked down 1%. Amazon Advertising, however, did not disappoint. “Advertising revenue was up 25% year over year, and that’s a strong run rate compared to the revenue growth rate,” CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors.