Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Advertiser Perceptions Cookieless Future Report Captures A “Snapshot” Of Industry Evolution
Just before Google Chrome postponed its phaseout of third-party cookies until late 2023, publishers and advertisers were both optimistic and unprepared, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ latest Cookieless Future Report. Based on surveys and interviews taken in April and May of this year, the report practically comes from a different age – but the data is […]
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Anthony Katsur On Leading The IAB Tech Lab – One Of The Toughest Gigs In Ad Tech
Anthony Katsur comes brandishing a fitting resume for IAB Tech Lab CEO. He held senior leadership roles at DoubleClick, MediaMath, Rubicon Project, Sonobi and Nexstar, and he’s familiar with the messy intersection where IAB rules and business frameworks meet on-the-ground technology. Katsur faces a tough job that would challenge even an experienced leader when he […]
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Cloud Data Company Snowflake Gives Ad Tech A Boost By Joining UID2
The Unified ID 2.0 (UID2), the programmatic industry’s open web advertising identifier, has steadily added to its partnership roster of brands, agencies, ad tech vendors and publishers in the past couple years, becoming the most-used ID aside from walled garden platforms like Google, Facebook and Amazon. But UID2’s newest addition is perhaps its most interesting […]
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Adelaide Raises $2 Million From Angel Backers To Develop Its Attention-Based Ad Metric
The online ad tech startup Adelaide raised $2 million its first investment round from a crew of industry angel investors to build out its attention-based advertising currency, the Attention Unit [AU], as an alternative to campaigns determined primarily by viewability. Adelaide’s AU factors in the context of the ad placement and the likelihood that the […]
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OPINION: The Sell SiderRevenueCat’s Barnard On The Simmering Apple-Developer Feud
“The Sell Sider” is a column written from the perspective of the sell side of the digital media community. App creator-turned-developer advocate David Barnard’s career trajectory is one typical of Apple’s App Store, but also exceptional to the App Store. A recording engineer with no software expertise, Barnard built a profitable stable of mobile apps, […]
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Publicis Groupe Buys Retail Media Platform To Hook Its Identity Into Epsilon
Publicis Groupe will acquire CitrusAd, an Australian retail media company, and place it within the Epsilon data business, the company announced on Thursday. CitrusAd’s direct connections to retailers – and the first-party data partnerships that come along with those connections – were a draw. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. CitrusAd is a competitor […]
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MGI’s Verve Group Adds Smaato For $170M, Scales Up For Post-Consolidation Ad Tech
Verve Group, the mobile ad tech unit of the gaming publisher Media and Games Invest (MGI), acquired the mobile gaming ad tech company Smaato on Tuesday for almost $170 million (140 million Euros). MGI Group, which trades on the Frankfurt stock exchange and a Stockholm-based Nasdaq exchange, updated its financial forecast after the Smaato deal […]
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How Ecommerce Is Bringing Online Advertising Into Supply Chain And Product Decisions
Ecommerce and retail marketers can no longer keep their eyes squarely focused on media metrics like ROAS. Their world has just gotten bigger. In addition to the media and advertising supply chain, they must consider product development and manufacturing along with shipping and fulfillment. Amazon provides sellers the metrics ACOS (Advertising as a Cost of […]
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Amperity Raises $100 Million As The CDP Category Grows Up
The customer data platform (CDP) craze isn’t over yet. The CDP startup Amperity raised $100 million on Tuesday at a valuation of a little more than $1 billion dollars. The new round brings Amperity’s total funding to $187 million. Amperity last raised $50 million in Series C funding in 2019. The billion-dollar valuation mints Amperity […]
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PODCAST: The Big StoryThe Trade Desk Does VC
The Trade Desk made waves this week with the release of Solimar, its new beach resort brand. Psych! Solimar is real, but it’s the company’s new DSP dashboard. In addition to the updated UI, The Trade Desk also launched a venture capital arm called TD7 – named for the $7 million seed investment that got […]
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The Trade Desk Launches Solimar, Its Pitch For The Open Internet Vs. The Walled Gardens
The Trade Desk introduced its latest DSP dashboard, Solimar, on Wednesday, as well as a venture capital arm called TD7. The company’s first startup investment is in the ad-bidding software company Chalice Custom Algorithms. Solimar consolidates The Trade Desk’s data marketplace for targeting and measurement into a single interface, with data onboarding and identity resolution […]
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Merkle Acquires LiveArea, A $250 Million Bet On Commerce Integrations
Dentsu-owned Merkle has acquired LiveArea, an experiential commerce agency, for $250 million, the companies said Tuesday. Merkle will add LiveArea’s 590 employees to its roster. LiveArea works with retailers and brands, though mostly retailers, on commerce and marketing. It provides design and creative strategy, but its primary offering integrates customer data with ecommerce tech such […]
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Big Brands Learn To Love – And Attribute – Twitch Gaming Sponsorships
Twitch has become a go-to spot for CPG product launches, as brands embrace the platform as a way to reach young people and run attribution case studies for online gaming. In one fresh example, a new custom pack of Sour Patch Kids had its debut this week in partnership with the Twitch streamer TimTheTatman. The […]
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FreshDirect Turns To OOH Attribution As It Refines Post-Pandemic Media Strategy
Out-of-home advertising has long been an important category for FreshDirect. It allows the grocery delivery service to reach city dwellers en masse — particularly in New York where it’s based. But once the pandemic took hold, the company had to rethink its OOH campaigns, as subway riders and use of public transport dwindled while demand […]
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Former Google Ads Leader Ramaswamy On Why His Next Startup Doesn’t Run Ads
Sridhar Ramaswamy left Google three years ago after a long stint as head of the company’s search and advertising products. His experience overseeing the world’s largest ad-supported business was among the most powerful roles in advertising, and set him up for practically any leadership role in data-driven marketing. So it raised eyebrows last year when […]
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The Online Advertising Industry Reacts To Chrome’s Cookie Deprecation Delay
Following Google’s announcement on Thursday that Chrome would be delaying its third-party cookie phaseout by almost two years, the overwhelming sentiment across the industry is … relief. Though agency, ad tech and programmatic publisher execs spun confident stories about plans for digital advertising without third-party cookies, that reality was more like a train rushing along […]
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Google Grants A Third-Party Cookie Reprieve, Delays Deprecation By Two Years
Are you having fun in the sandbox? I hope so, because it’s going to be awhile. Google‘s plan to deprecate third-party cookies by Q2 2022 will be delayed by almost two years, so publishers, advertisers and web developers have time to test and build feasible alternatives, the company announced in a blog post on Thursday. […]
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The Birds-Eye View Of Amazon’s Advertising Business
Amazon’s advertising business has exploded in the past five years. Its DSP footprint now rivals Google and it has the second most-used SSP. The online retailer earned more than $22 billion in ad revenue just in the past year. But Amazon’s advertising business is also a sprawling, mysterious empire, even for advertisers that spend heavily […]
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How Apple’s New ‘Hide My Email’ Feature May Plague Publishers And Ad Tech
Hello, subscribers, are you there? Newsletter operators may ask that question more often, after Apple announced new privacy protections for email users earlier this month at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Specifically, Apple introduced “Hide my Email,” a feature that generates fake email addresses that forward to someone’s real address, so people can sign […]
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T-Mobile Hires Ad Tech Vet Mike Peralta As It Pushes Into Programmatic
The “un-carrier” is getting into programmatic. T-Mobile has hired ad tech vet Mike Peralta, former CEO of AudienceScience, EVP at Criteo and CRO of Future, as VP of Marketing Solutions, an ad tech and analytics business unit that uses the company’s first-party mobile data. “Everyone’s watched what’s going on with AT&T and Verizon,” Peralta said, […]
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Why Amazon Fire TV Cleared Out Third-Party DSPs – And What That Means For Programmatic
Two years ago, Amazon announced a programmatic Fire TV program with The Trade Desk and dataxu as inaugural DSP partners. “This agreement is an important indicator of where the industry is going, and will become just one of many, over time,” The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green told employees at the time. But the dream […]
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Google Still Dominates Advertiser Perceptions SSP Report, But The Field Has Toughened
The recent Advertiser Perceptions survey of the SSP market shows that (drumroll ….) Google is still the dominant gateway for online advertising, though publishers are testing and adding other SSPs more than ever. The survey was fielded in February and March of this year, and encompasses 151 publishing execs, each of whom represents a site […]
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Ecom Brands Are Connecting Their Warehouses To Ad Tech With Whitebox
The ecommerce marketplace management startup Whitebox launched an analytics product on Thursday that spans the world of ad tech and that of warehouse and delivery services. There is a boom crop of ecommerce tech companies that manage advertisements and product listings on Amazon and other online marketplaces (but mostly Amazon). Amazon ad agency Teikametrics acquired […]
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Vox Media Extends Its First-Party Data Platform Across Concert
To make it easier for publishers to use its first-party data across a wide network of sites, Vox Media on Tuesday announced a new suite of tools for Concert, its publisher monetization tech, that come from the digital media company’s internal first-party data platform Forte. The new products address brand safety, targeting and optimization. Brands […]
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OPINION: The Sell SiderInside Blackstone’s $1.3 Billion Bet On B2B Data And Media With IDG
Blackstone made one of the splashiest digital media deals of the past year last week when it acquired the B2B media and mar tech company International Data Group (IDG). IDG might not attract your average consumer. but its portfolio of some 300 tech and IT publications, including CSO, TechHive and Computerworld, fuels one of the […]
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Google Tightens ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ Policies For Android Ad ID
Google will zero out the Android Advertising ID – literally – when users have opted out of personalized advertising starting later this year. The company notified mobile developers Thursday about the switch. Currently, users who have opted out of tracking and personalized advertising are still tagged by the Advertising ID when they open an app, […]
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33Across Throws Itself Into Cookieless Targeting
33Across has introduced a cookieless targeting solution in an effort to help publishers and advertisers retain the value of programmatic without advertising IDs. At the root of the cookie-free targeting product, called Lexicon, is a probabilistic identifier 33Across calls the Pub Token. The Pub Token combines contextual signals – such as the time of day, […]
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Google Clarifies Its Stance On Post-Cookie Advertising IDs – And It’s Not Good For Ad Tech
Google gave its clearest guidance yet regarding how the company will treat shared advertising identifiers once third-party cookies are removed from Chrome. And it’s not good news for ad tech companies that have championed universal ID programs. In March, Google’s director of product management for ads privacy and trust, David Temkin, confirmed in a company […]
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NBCU Completes Sports Tech Investments And Readies Olympics Pilot Programs
Are you gearing up for the Summer Olympics? So is NBCUniversal. Comcast-owned NBCU culminated its inaugural SportsTech Accelerator program on Wednesday, investing $50,000 in each of 10 startups and blessing those startups with important broadcast activations just in time for the biggest event in global sports and advertising. Eon Media, a Toronto-based software company that […]
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Walgreens Partners With OpenAP For TV Advertising IDs
What if you saw TV ads inspired by what you recently shopped for at Walgreens? To bring its shopper data to a new channel – advanced TV – Walgreens Advertising Group (WAG), the retail chain’s ad tech subsidiary, will integrate Walgreens’ first-party identity data set with OpenID, an advertising ID backed by linear broadcast networks […]