Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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 […]
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The China-Based, Amazon-Based Brand Giant Anker Has Big Plans For Ad Tech Services
The past year has seen a huge influx of consumer brands launching their own advertising businesses. Buy-now-pay-later service providers, ride-share companies Uber and Lyft and food and grocery delivery apps have all recently launched search ads and programmatic sales or data services. The publicly traded multilevel marketing skincare product brand Nu Skin bought an ad […]
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OPINION: On TV & VideoComcast’s Forecast Labs Plots A New Course With Its Approach To VC Investing
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. There’s nothing new about a tech-and-media giant like Comcast creating a venture capital arm. But Forecast Labs, a unit of Comcast Ventures, is putting a new spin on VC investments by leveraging unique access to Comcast inventory and media […]
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OPINION: The Sell SiderThe Sports Marketing Institution Learfield Has Big Plans For College Athletes (Now That They Can Make Money)
Jennifer Davis was named CMO of Learfield, a college sports sponsorship and media company, in March of this year. In June, the Supreme Court upended the world of college sports and marketing by handing down a decision that guarantees college athletes the right to accept sponsorship and endorsement deals – which formerly would have had […]
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Retailers Enter This Year’s Holiday Season With Important Open-Ended Marketing Questions
Retailers and big retail brands typically embark on Q4 with their plan firmly in place. Pricing and promotions, inventory deliveries and expected sales are all known factors. Companies test, learn and implement during the first nine months of the year and by the holidays they should be riding on rails. And tech providers oblige. The […]
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Innovid CEO Zvika Netter On The Company’s IPO And Its Plan To Win CTV Ad Serving
Innovid is a rare breed of data-driven ad tech company. It’s an internet-based tech startup founded in 2007 that focused from day one on … old-school television. Fast forward 15 years to this Wednesday, and Innovid is going public under the ticker $CTV. Innovid is the latest in a troop of ad tech players to […]
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How Aerospike Built A Business To Serve The Data-Obsessed Ad Tech Category
As the ad tech industry matures, vendor types historically focused on other markets are expanding to meet its needs. Media and advertising, for example, is now Snowflake’s biggest business vertical, and payment solutions provider FastPay is helping publishers and ad tech companies manage reconciliation and accounting gaps between when ad campaigns are served and advertisers […]
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Hunger For New Subscribers Is Driving Down Prices As Brands Discard Acquisition Cost Models
The subscription business has never been easy. But this is perhaps the toughest season ever for subscription-based companies. On the one hand, physical product shortages and ecommerce delivery struggles make digital subscription deals more compelling. Consumer products like Masterclass, Peloton and Audible all sell subscriptions. But those same businesses are among the most keenly affected […]
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Nielsen Fires Off Dual Lawsuits Against Panel Measurement Startups TVision And HyphaMetrics
Nielsen took some kicks while it was down this year, delivered courtesy of rivals happy to capitalize on its MRC dis-accreditation and soured relationships with broadcasters. But big companies can take a few kicks, and still throw a few punches of their own. Nielsen is suing TVision and HyphaMetrics, two panel-based TV measurement startups, for […]
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Warner Music Launches WMX, Its First-Party Media Platform Play
If you’ve heard enough about publishers launching their own first-party media platforms … stop reading. And maybe take a vacation for the next year or two. Warner Music Group (WMG) is the latest to throw its hat in the ring, with the launch on Thursday of a rebranded agency and ad tech business geared specifically […]
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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 […]