Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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YouTube Announces New ‘Storefront’ Video Format With A Twist On DR
Google released a direct response ad format for YouTube on Thursday that will make YouTube ads more shoppable, and more closely integrated with a brand’s Google Merchant Center account. The idea is to make a video ad campaign a potential “storefront” for ecommerce companies, said YouTube sales VP Adam Stewart. The new ad format creates […]
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NBCU’s Mark Marshall On How TV Advertising Will Evolve This Year
AdExchanger’s Social Distancing With Friends podcast now has its own channel. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In March, NBCUniversal had “fortunately and unfortunately” just finished a recession-based ad sales deck, to pitch advertisers on strategies that worked during previous downturns, in case the economy did turn south this year, said Mark […]
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The IAB Tech Lab Sunsets DigiTrust, As Third-Party Cookies Turn To Dust
The IAB Tech Lab is shuttering the DigiTrust cookie-sharing program as of the end of July, the group said Wednesday. DigiTrust was a platform for SSPs and publishers to sync cookies with DSPs, thus improving match rates and web latency. The non-profit org spun out of an IAB working group in 2014, and the IAB […]
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ALC Rebrands As Adstra, And Enters The Crowded Identity Graph Market
The marketing data company ALC, which started out 40 years ago creating consumer segments for direct mail advertisers, relaunched Tuesday as Adstra, with a new mission as a data onboarding and identity graph provider. Adstra is following a well-beaten path for companies that transformed offline consumer data sets based on home addresses and landline phone […]
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BidSwitch's Barry Adams On Keeping An Eye On The Bouncing Ball In Ad Tech
AdExchanger’s Social Distancing With Friends podcast now has its own channel. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Barry Adams, general manager of BidSwitch, lived abroad for 20 years, in China, Hong Kong and most recently London – until the end of January this year, when he got married and moved to New […]
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Lytics: How An OG CDP Distinguishes Itself In a Crowded Category
This is the sixth in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Amperity, Segment, ActionIQ, Bluecore, Microsoft, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe, Treasure Data and BlueConic. Everyone and their mother operates a customer data platform (CDP) nowadays. And that crowding obscures the actual purpose of a CDP, said James McDermott, co-founder and CEO of the CDP Lytics. […]
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AMC Becomes First Independent Network To Join The On Addressability Initiative
The On Addressability initiative, a joint venture between Comcast, Charter and Cox, has added AMC Networks as its first independent broadcast partner, the companies announced on Wednesday. Comcast launched the On Addressability initiative at the Cannes Lions festival in June 2019 to transition more TV commercials to addressable ad sales. The joint venture allows brands […]
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How B2B Sellers Became DTC Brands During The Pandemic
The direct-to-consumer brand revolution has been going strong for a decade, but the coronavirus pandemic has created new opportunities for B2B and wholesale manufacturers to flood the consumer market. Rastelli’s, a New Jersey-based food supplier, fortuitously started a consumer branding business last year, said director of marketing Zachary Paul. Instead of selling products through grocers […]
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Ad Tech Madness Stokes Online Competition For Tournament-Starved Techies
Welcome to Ad Tech Madness, a no-holds-barred Twitter tournament where David finally has a fighting chance against Goliath. Born as a content marketing stunt by Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo, Ad Tech Madness pits ad tech players against each other in daylong races for votes, and has captured pent-up desire for live competition and for elimination […]
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Doritos To Sponsor Twitch Tourneys, Embracing Live Gaming Risk And Reward
Video games have proven their marketing mettle during the coronavirus crisis, with people stuck at home and live sports and TV frozen in limbo. The latest example of that trend comes from Doritos, which is teaming up with Twitch to host a series of esports tournaments over the course of the year. The Doritos Disruptor […]
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Beeswax Releases Snowflake Cloud Partnership To Take On Ads Data Hub
The demand-side platform Beeswax launched a data warehouse product Monday that company CEO Ari Paparo described as analogous to Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH). The Beeswax version is called Antenna and it’s built on the cloud technology company Snowflake, a warehousing and analytics service that is itself built on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services […]
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksBacardi CMO John Burke On Recapturing Experiential Marketing (And Fun)
Bacardi CMO John Burke has been in lockdown at his home in London for the past two months. And his challenge is to figure out how to bring people together to relax and enjoy a drink … when people can’t gather together or, seemingly, relax. There are opportunities to reach consumers and be a part […]
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President Trump Signs Executive Order To Remove Legal Shield For Online Platforms
Miffed by Twitter adding fact-checking labels to some of his tweets this week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that, if enacted, would challenge social media companies or other aggregation platforms that moderate or remove political content. The reported draft of the executive order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency […]
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Connexity Buys Skimlinks, Adding An Affiliate Network To Its Retail Marketing Toolkit
That’s one serious commission. Retail performance marketing company Connexity has acquired Skimlinks, one of the larger (now formerly) independent affiliate networks. Terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, were not disclosed. But Connexity is adding the roughly 80-person Skimlinks team, said CEO Sebastien Blanc, who took on the top job in 2018. That brings Connexity’s […]
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksSocial Distancing With Friends: Visible CMO Minjae Ormes
Minjae Ormes moved to a new home in Denver in March, on Corona Street, believe it or not. A few days later, a shelter-in-place rule was in effect and Visible, the Verizon pay-as-you go mobile cell service and data service where Minjae is CMO, did a full overhaul of its marketing strategy and value prop […]
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LiveRamp Earnings Show It Has The Runway (And Cash) To Weather This Crisis
The recent string of relatively strong Q1 ad tech performances continued on Thursday, when LiveRamp announced revenue grew 35% year over year to $106 million. The toughest quarter is still to come. LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe cautioned investors that Q2 could show a sequential decline in revenue and potentially be net-zero or negative in terms […]
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Target And Walmart Earnings Show How American Shopping Has Been Reset
Walmart and Target, which both reported quarterly earnings this week, underscore how American shopping habits are being reshaped. Walmart and Target both saw a double-digit increase in average cart value (16.5% and 12.5%, respectively) and a single-digit decline in the number of transactions, since people stocked up with fewer shopping trips. Older Americans also boosted […]
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksSocial Distancing With Friends: Eyeo CEO Till Faida
Eyeo GmbH, the German tech company that owns the popular ad blocker Adblock Plus, has navigated a tricky course as the world’s largest ad blocker and, more recently, as an advertising platform in its own right. For years, ad blocking was an uncomfortable topic in digital media and advertising. Nowadays, online ad platforms and mobile […]
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Facebook Goes Further Into Ecommerce With New 'Shops' Feature
Facebook on Tuesday launched a new commerce toolkit, called Shops, with a revamped model for how the company fits into the online shopping landscape. Shops will give every SMB, merchant and product company the ability to set up a virtual storefront across Facebook’s app properties. Unlike previous Facebook and Instagram commerce products, Shops will also […]
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While The World Falls Apart The Stock Market – And Ad Tech Especially – Keeps Pumping
With almost two months of nationwide lockdowns under our belts and a round of quarterly earnings reports, Wall Street’s sentiment around digital media and ad tech companies is … surprisingly positive. Companies that rely on advertising are supposed to be among the most prone to recessions and market panic, since advertising is historically tied to […]
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Moat Introduces New Reach Tool For Cross-Platform Digital Campaigns
Digital ad mainstay Moat is getting into reach-based measurement, and incorporating TV. The Oracle Data Cloud unit revealed the general availability of its cross-platform reach tool, Moat Reach, on Tuesday. Oracle Data Cloud has been working on Moat Reach for more than a year, said product management VP Kevin Whitcher. It integrates Moat’s analytics platform, […]
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Chrome To Block Data-Greedy Ads – As More Control Moves To Browser Software
Chrome said Thursday that it will start limiting the data and computing resources a display ad can use before the ad will be considered abusive and is blocked. Chrome product manager Marshall Vale wrote in a blog post that the decision will “save our users batteries and data plans.” Read the post. This announcement targets […]
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Criteo’s SPARROW Proposal Marks Ad Tech’s Venture Into Privacy Sandboxes And W3C
Hear the birds chirping? No, not those birds. On Monday, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) working group for digital advertising standards had its first call where it discussed a new privacy proposal by Criteo called SPARROW (Secure Private Advertising Remotely Run On Webserver), according to three sources who participated. The SPARROW proposal is a response […]
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AdExchanger Politics: The Coronavirus Handicaps Challenger Campaigns
You are reading AdExchanger Politics, our news roundup in which senior editor James Hercher tracks the latest developments in political advertising, augmenting our political marketing commentary and news coverage. Want it by email? Sign up here. While everyone in politics is figuring out on the fly how COVID-19 will affect US elections this year, it seems already […]
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Top CPG Brands Rush To Take Advantage Of DTC Businesses
CPGs like Pepsi and Kraft-Heinz urgently need to develop ecommerce and direct-to-consumer business lines, whereas Anheuser-Busch InBev – having invested already in ecommerce – can now shift its media spend to support it. “As you’re hearing from everybody else, ecommerce has become a high-growth channel at this point,” Pepsi CEO Ramon Laguarta said Wednesday during […]
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The Trade Desk Grows Revenue By A Third, Still Focused On CTV
The Trade Desk earned $160.7 million in Q1 2020, up by a third from a year ago, with connected TV ads powering its growth and its growth prospects this year, according to the company’s earnings report Thursday. Linear television had been decelerating at a steady 3-4% clip for the last five years, said The Trade […]
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Shopify Bets Big On New Merchants As Retail Scrambles For COVID Commerce Solutions
A wave of new brands and merchants are adopting Shopify’s retail technology, as consumer behavior swings during the coronavirus pandemic. Shopify said during its Q1 earnings Wednesday that the number of new stores selling on its platform grew by 62% in the second half of Q1 compared to the first half, and the number of […]
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New Profitero CEO Bryan Wiener On Winning The New Normal In Ecommerce
The dynamic duo of Bryan Wiener and Sarah Hofstetter is back in business. This time at the helm of the ecommerce analytics company Profitero. Wiener and Hofstetter were the CEO and president, respectively, of the agency 360i, which was acquired by Dentsu. Later, they both took up similar positions at the measurement firm Comscore, before […]
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Pinterest Ad Spend Grows 35%, But Investors Are Spooked By Retail Fallout
Pinterest made $272 million in Q1 this year, a 35% jump from the same period in 2019, but its net loss increased by $100 million because ad spend crumbled in March. The company “began 2020 on strong footing,” said Pinterest CFO Todd Morgenfeld during the company earnings call Tuesday, but April ad spend declined by […]
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Roku Relaunches Dataxu As OneView, Marrying Its User Data To The DSP
Roku said Tuesday it rebranded dataxu, the DSP it acquired last October, and is introducing it as a programmatic ad-buying platform called OneView, with capabilities powered by Roku’s first-party data. OneView was the name of a dataxu’s cross-device identity graph, which is joining with Roku’s data from 39 million US households to combine programmatic performance […]