Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Academic Study Shows European Startup Investments Diminished In The Wake Of GDPR
Investment in European startups has dropped by 36% compared to American or other global startups since the rollout of GDPR. At least, that’s what the data shows in a report published in the academic journal Marketing Science this month. The new report, titled “The Short-Run Effects of the General Data Protection Regulation on Technology Venture […]
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Can These Search Engines Do The Impossible – Peel Market Share From Google?
After more than a decade of relative stasis in the search engine market – which is to say, Google cementing its dominance at every step – is there an opportunity for Google alternatives to gain share? Some big-name players in the space think so. In June, there was the public launch of Neeva, an ad-free […]
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Criteo Sees Ad Revenue Rebound, And Reshapes Its Pitch As A DSP And SSP Hybrid
Criteo reported revenues of $551 million in Q2 2021, up 26% from the same period last year, while its profitability increased from $6 million to $15 million. The year-over-year metric is inflated this quarter for practically all advertising companies, because Q2 last year held the worst of the pullback on marketing during the pandemic. And […]
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How Driscoll’s Stays Sweet As Groceries And Ad Dollars Move Online
Driscoll’s, the century-old fresh fruit company, is no stranger to change. But the transition to online ordering is a tricky one for the brand. Driscoll’s works with geneticists and fruit growers to hone the tastiest berry varieties, and its sales and marketing arm brings the fruit to market. But its marketing and seed-editing machine is […]
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Amazon Advertising Revenue Eclipses $7B – And Is Still Picking Up Speed
Amazon doesn’t disclose advertising revenues in its quarterly earnings reports. It bundles the ad group into an “Other” category, which consists of advertising and analytics services. But even without a specific number, it’s clear that Amazon’s advertising business is both massive and growing fast. Amazon’s Other category earned more than $7.9 billion in Q2, up […]
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Conviva Leaps From Video Analytics To Bidstream Data With First Ad Tech Partnership
The streaming analytics company Conviva released its first ad tech product, a contextual data integration with The Trade Desk, on Thursday. Conviva places a sensor in publishers and programmers’ videos or streaming content. The sensor isn’t a third-party data collector like a cookie or SDK. It’s the tool the publishers place in their video players […]
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Google Cruises On Digital Ad Resurgence And Retail Client Gains
Alphabet reported total revenue of almost $61.9 billion in Q2 2021, a 62% year-over-year increase. The company’s Q2 profit jumped from $7 billion in 2020 to $18.5 billion this year. The eye-popping growth rate is misleading. Q2 last year was a disaster; The first time Alphabet (or Google before that) ever reported a yearly revenue […]
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Sponsored Product Ads Have Taken Over Amazon Search – And They Won’t Stop There
More and more ecommerce sales are preceded by paid product listings. The advance of ecommerce advertising in the past year and a half can be seen in the revenue growth in Amazon earnings reports and the promulgation of retail media platforms such as Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel and Google Shopping. Marketers, too, are getting used […]
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Taboola Targets Ecommerce And Affiliate With $800M Deal For Connexity
Taboola has had a busy month. Three weeks after the company began trading on the Nasdaq, it acquired the commerce-based ad tech company Connexity for $800 million on Friday. Connexity is a logical and alluring takeover target. Taboola places recommendation boxes on publisher sites to connect visitors with advertisers and other publishers. Connexity is also […]
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Ad Agency Holding Companies Celebrate Return Of Ad Revenue And Regained Confidence
A year ago, all the major ad agency holding companies were digging themselves out of a deep hole, as investors hedged their bets on the return of ad budgets and even the survival of traditional agencies. Fast forward one year – and what a difference that year has made. Omnicom lost more than a third […]
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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, […]