Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Identity Resolution Startup MediaWallah Raises $2.3 Million As The Spaces Catches Fire
The identity data market is heating up as companies collect more first-party data and marketers do their damnedest to maintain addressable advertising without cookies or mobile ad IDs. The category already includes the incumbent LiveRamp, major agency holding companies – Dentsu’s Merkle, IPG and Acxiom and Publicis plus Epsilon – and startups, such as Zeotap […]
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Conagra Data Scientist Brian Archey On Why Retail Data Should Be Bigger Than Retail Media
The retail data revolution is constrained by its laser-focus on advertising, if you ask Brian Archey, Conagra Brand’s sr. director of data science and analytics. Clean room data environments are the playgrounds of digital marketers, who use them for audience extension and analytics. But these cloud-based services hold more promise as business intelligence tools, Archey […]
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VideoAmp’s Josh Chasin On The Somehow-Enduring Value Of TV Panel Data
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is by AdExchanger Sr. Editor James Hercher. It wasn’t so long ago that around one-fifth or more of the entire adult-age population of America would simultaneously sit down and watch a TV show at the same time. […]
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OPINION: The Sell SiderWill People Pay For A Search Engine? Subscription Biz Vet Steven Shure Thinks So
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Steven Shure has surfed big subscription waves in the past. For 20 years, he led the subscription program for Time Inc. magazines. Then he joined Amazon as VP of a little project called Prime. He oversaw various Amazon consumer and […]
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Another Consumer Brand Enters Ad Tech, As MLM Seller Nu Skin Acquires Mavely
Wall Street prognosticator Dan Salmon said last month at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference that “every consumer-facing company will become an advertising company.” And here’s the latest example: On Wednesday, Nu Skin, a publicly traded multilevel marketing (MLM) company that sells skincare products and supplements, acquired mobile commerce startup Mavely. Terms of the deal were not […]
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AMEX Invests In ‘Shoppertainment’ Startup Firework, As Merchants Push For Video Commerce
AMEX is tuning into “shoppertainment.” On Tuesday, American Express Ventures, the credit card company’s venture capital group, invested in Firework, a live shopping and video ad tech company that works with brands and merchants to create TikTok-style videos featuring products with direct sales and add-to-cart functionality. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Firework was […]
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IAB Report Charts The Rise Of Ecommerce Brands Fed By CTV And Retail Media
The twentieth century saw very little disruption for category-leading brands. Del Monte fruit, Nabisco biscuits, Gold Medal flour, Sherwin-Williams paint, Gillette razors, Lipton tea, Ivory soap – across practically every consumer business, America’s top brands in 1923 were the same category leaders 60 years later. But nearly one century on, those rankings are starting to […]
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To Accrue First-Party Data, Food & Beverage Brands Try Out Sales Gimmicks
Pokémon Oreos, limited edition Sour Patch Kids, Heinz Halloween outfits and McDonald’s BTS meals. As brands go all-in on ecommerce and digital data, there’s been a notable recent uptick in their efforts to acquire first-party ecom data by dangling personalized or limited-edition products. Savvy kids might even call them thirsty, even as they enter their […]
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There’s (Finally) A Marketer Case Study For Unified ID 2.0
The Trade Desk spent the last year and a half signing up a host of partners to support the Unified ID 2.0 program – but none of that means much without getting brand marketers involved. Most of UID2’s supporters so far have been ad tech companies and online publishers, which makes sense. Ad tech players don’t […]
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Why Trade Desk Vet David Danziger Jumped To Clean Room Startup Habu
The market for first-party cloud data services has exploded. InfoSum raised $65 million in August at a valuation of $300 million, up from $100 million after a funding round last year. Brian Lesser left AT&T-owned Xandr last December to serve as InfoSum’s CEO. And then there’s Snowflake, the cloud data company that went public last […]
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After A Two-Year Quiet Phase, Amazon’s Data Clean Room Service Enters The Market
Get your mop and vacuum ready, because the clean room craze is only getting started. Amazon on Tuesday launched the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), its cloud-based clean room product, from beta. Marketers can now integrate AMC with the Amazon demand-side platform (DSP) for campaign measurement and analytics. AMC is built on the Amazon Web Services […]
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Snowflake Launches A Media Cloud, As It Builds Out Programmatic Services
Snowflake, the cloud data services company, launched a Media Cloud on Tuesday, bringing together customers and businesses with specific needs related to media and advertising. The new Media Cloud is a suite of data products and integrations for services such as measurement and attribution, identity resolution, profile enrichment and advertising activations. Experian’s identity data and […]
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Advertiser Perceptions DSP Wave Charts The Rise Of Self-Serve Tech
Let us help you serve yourself. That’s the accelerating trend in fast-food chains, car dealerships, remote work life and, yes, in ad tech. The ascendancy of the self-serve DSP is here, according to the latest Advertiser Perceptions DSP wave. The report is based on a survey of 336 brand and agency advertisers who spend at […]
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How Facebook Is Overhauling Its Attribution Standards To Deal With Apple’s ATT
This is part one of a two-part deep dive series on the changing face of attribution. Facebook’s had a tough time of it recently. There was the explosive Wall Street Journal Facebook exposé, whistleblowing on Capitol Hill and the stock market’s reaction, which shaved tens of billions off Facebook’s valuation in a single day. But […]
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FTC Commissioner Advocates ‘Data Minimization’ In Advertising
What if all the privacy-safe, transparent, opt-in and consent-based digital advertising initiatives of the past few years turn out, a few years hence, to have been an entire waste of time? It’s not such a far-flung possibility. Privacy and consumer data solutions in the market have “hinged on the principles of notice and choice” for […]
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Zeta Global Acquires Apptness, Hiring And Employment-Based Survey Data Company
Zeta Global acquired the digital survey technology company Apptness for $41 million, with up to $20 million in additional incentive-based payouts, according to an SEC filing on Monday. Apptness is a tool for publishers to create surveys and gather responses (and those golden email opt-ins) from users. Its main business is working with sites and […]
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Survey Data Firm CivicScience Launches An Ad Business, Rulo
CivicScience, an online polling and survey data firm, took its first official step into the media arena on Monday with the launch of Rulo, an ad-buying and programmatic data business. CivicScience had considered an advertising business for years. Brand and publisher clients clamored for a data service, said Rulo CEO Doug Lauretano. Marketers and publishers […]
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Digiday Vets Launch Subscription Content Service, In A New Field Of Journalist-Consultants
The internet is filled with newsletters, endless Twitter threads, white papers and SEO-based blog posts that claim to be resources for marketers and organizations investing in content and subscription businesses. But, at heart, most advice for how to create content isn’t authored by a respected writer in the space. And that content is often […]
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Goodbye, Last-Click Attribution: Google Ads Changes Default To Data Modeling
Is this truly the end of last-click attribution? Google will no longer use last-click attribution as the default conversion model in Google Ads, its buy-side ad network, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The change will mean that, going forward, the default attribution method for any conversion touchpoint – a new product […]
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OPINION: The Sell SiderHow Rakuten Rewards Is Adapting To A New Affiliate Model – The First-Party Ad Platform
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Rakuten Rewards, formerly Ebates, is an 800-pound gorilla in the affiliate marketing business. But what’s the point of being biggest if nobody wants to be in the affiliate business? Since its acquisition by the Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten and […]
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Oracle’s Moat Launches Outcomes API For CPG Sales, With StackAdapt As Initial DSP Partner
The results are in. Oracle’s Moat Outcomes API, a product that attributes digital ad impressions to in-store product sales, announced its first DSP integration with StackAdapt on Thursday. The product is specific for CPG and retail vertical clients, with Moat licensing data from retail membership and loyalty programs to connect those customers to online identity […]
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Why Non-Advertising Businesses Are Going Into Ads
One of the most important trends in advertising right now is the rapid growth of ad businesses stood up by non-advertising companies. The OG of this category is Amazon. The online retailer has shown ads can be a high-margin addition to the bottom line, boosting profit without heavy upfront investments for any business with valuable […]
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Oracle Fuses Together A CDP And CRM For A Lead-Gen Tool
Oracle launched a prospecting and lead-scoring product called Fusion Marketing on Monday, as the company tries to reframe the value of the CRM in a world gone crazy for the CDP. Fusion is the first in a series of what Oracle is calling “Engineered Experiences,” its term for automating workflow processes across different business orgs […]
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How Online Grocery Seller Hungryroot Benefits From Not Launching An Ad Platform
The country’s largest grocers are adapting to new shopping habits with a hybrid model that combines their brick-and-mortar footprint with online advertising platforms. Although Amazon paved the way with its ad platform and 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods, grocery giants, including Kroger and Walmart, are also investing heavily in sponsored search and programmatic. And now […]
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Meet System1, The Billion-Dollar Ad Tech Biz IPOing Later This Year
Are you tired of SPACs already? Too bad! There are more SPACs. Another market entrant is the performance advertising company System1, which will list on the Nasdaq later this year, likely by November, after completing a merger with one such “special purpose acquisition company,” said CEO and co-founder Michael Blend. System1’s SPAC arrangement isn’t analogous […]
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Why Spectrum Brands Is Bringing Its Amazon Advertising Approach To The Web
There is a distinct Amazon approach to advertising, and it’s taking over the rest of retail media. To be successful within the walled garden platform, brands must be sharply focused on search. They also become accustomed to seeing ad costs factored as an incremental part of overall sales. Spectrum Brands honed its advertising approach on […]
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Mediaocean Switches Private Equity Owners, As It Evolves For An Internet-Delivered Age
Mediaocean will be switching private equity portfolios, moving from Vista Equity to CVC Capital Partners and TA Associates, the company announced on Tuesday. The valuation of Mediaocean or of Vista’s stake was not disclosed, except that CVC and TA are taking on Vista’s equity share. John Nardone, CEO of the Flashtalking ad server that Mediaocean […]
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Madtech Founders Spot Advisory Opportunity For Ad Tech Vets
A number of longtime programmatic veterans have shifted to independent consultancies, since so many brands, publishers and tech companies need help with data-driven business transformation. And the category gained another competitor on Tuesday with the launch of Madtech Advisors, a consultancy founded by Bob Walczak, who will serve as CEO, and Aditya Kulkarni serving as […]
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UK Could Scrap Cookie Pop-ups And Some GDPR Restrictions
The British government is considering an alternative to the GDPR in the wake of the country’s split from the EU. Its plans call for fewer cookie notification pop-ups and less aggressive enforcement by regulators. The UK Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden told The Daily Telegraph that the country should have a new data protection law that […]
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Shopify Pushes Further Into Social Channels, As The Hunt For Online Customers Intensifies
The first era of online shopping was independent merchants setting up their own sites. And the second era simply belonged to Amazon. But now we’re in a third era, which could be known as the social commerce age. Put differently: the age of Shopify. The ecommerce tech company announced an integration with TikTok on Tuesday, […]