Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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 […]
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Getting Down With BOPIS, The New Normal For Grocery Shopping
A year ago, if you overheard someone say “BOPIS is all the rage,” you could be forgiven for mistaking the reference for obscure ’90s-era slang. But nowadays, “buy online pick up in store” is as normal as, well, doing groceries. And it’s going to change retail advertising forever. Publicis Groupe forecast in 2019 that it would […]
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Amazon Advertising (And The Rest Of Its Business) Is Booming, But Profit’s On Hold
No company in the world is better positioned than Amazon to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic stronger. Most advertising companies suffered a painful contraction in March. But Amazon’s advertising revenue was up by about 40% in Q1 compared to the year before, accounting for most of the $3.9 billion Amazon earned in its “Other” business […]
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Mondelēz Shifts Investments To Paid Media To Capture Online Orders And US Snacking
Retail foot traffic and recessions be damned, people need to snack. That fact has boosted Mondelēz, despite the coronavirus crisis and economic downturns. And, unlike in previous recessions, Mondelēz is investing to win market share, instead of cutting spend to protect the bottom line, CEO Dirk Van de Put told investors on a quarterly earnings […]
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COVID-19 Keeps Google From Monetizing Users, Despite Skyrocketing Demand
Alphabet had a surprisingly strong performance in Q1 2020, with revenues up 13% from last year to a total of $41.2 billion, according to the company’s earnings report on Tuesday. YouTube revenue passed $4 billion in Q1, up from $3 billion a year ago. But Google is preparing for a much tougher Q2. “Q1 was […]
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The NFL Draft Sees Record Interest During Live Sports Drought
So much chips and salsa is slowly growing stale, beer and soda going flat. If you think the average American TV viewer misses live sports, consider the desperation for brands that target sports advertising. The NFL Draft is seeing clearly enough, with a surge of demand from advertisers that are itching for the return of […]
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Google To Make All Advertisers Submit Personal IDs, Business Verification Docs
Google will require advertisers to submit personal identification or business documents that prove who they are and what country they operate in, the company announced on Thursday. The process will start in the United States and then expand globally, but it will take a few years before the new business verification program is complete, according […]
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New Adform CEO Troels Jensen Enters Ad Tech In The COVID-19 Era
Welcome to ad tech. Everything’s a disaster. But Troels Jensen, former CEO of the Danish fin tech company Itiviti AB, who was brought on as Adform’s chief in April, is sticking to the plan. “The long game hasn’t changed,” Jensen said. “But we do have time now to think about how we’re hitting the ground […]
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksSocial Distancing With Friends: Jeff Green
AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. Jeff Green, The Trade Desk founder and CEO, is at home in Southern California, grounded for the longest time in decades, according to the ad tech vet and business road warrior. But The Trade Desk isn’t hitting pause. Because many smaller ad platforms and startups that […]
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CPMs Take A Hit, But Programmatic Auctions Have Healthy ROAS – For Now
While the increased digital media supply caused by the pandemic has prompted CPMs to plummet – dropping 20% in March, according to ad analytics company Adomik – programmatic auctions are still healthy. Certainly bidding in March declined overall, said Francois de Laigue, Adomik’s VP of sales and strategic partnerships. The average dropped from 2.5 to […]
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksSocial Distancing With Friends: Skift CEO Rafat Ali
Travel is the backbone for many business categories, including entertainment, events, hospitality and food and dining. But that backbone is broken right now, and may never fully recover. Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of the travel industry publishing company Skift, has his finger on the pulse of the travel industry. It was three years after the 9/11 attacks […]
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FreeWheel Launches Unified Direct-Sold/Programmatic Product With NBCU And The Trade Desk
NBCUniversal opened more of its inventory to programmatic platforms on Monday, with a new product integration through FreeWheel and The Trade Desk. FreeWheel, a sister-company of Comcast’s NBCU, is coming out of beta with its “unified decisioning” platform, which operates an auction where programmatic demand is considered alongside direct-sold campaigns for OTT inventory and video […]
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OpenX Adds Insurance Line For DSP Payment Defaults
The sell-side ad tech company OpenX said in a note sent to clients Thursday it has added an insurance line to cover potential DSP payment defaults and warned publishers against working with supply chain intermediaries that won’t insure campaign spend. “Our strong advice to you is to only work with exchanges that can indemnify you […]
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Telemedicine Startup Maven Clinic’s Marketing Plan Shifts From B2B To B2C, Due To The Pandemic
Julie Binder left New York City last month for an Airbnb upstate, where she and her husband can get outside and wring excess energy from their two kids. But she doesn’t just have her own family to think about. Binder is VP of marketing for Maven Clinic, a telemedicine startup focused on pregnancy and women’s […]
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Amazon Removes Third-Party Vendors From Its Affiliate Program
Amazon has removed third-party vendors from its affiliate program. Starting at the beginning of this month, affiliate networks such as Skimlinks and Sovrn (which acquired VigLink) can no longer send traffic to Amazon and get a cut of transactions, according to sources at many affiliate networks and publishers. Removing third-party affiliate networks frees up significant […]
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksSocial Distancing With Friends: BuySellAds CEO Todd Garland
Todd Garland spent the past 12 years building BuySellAds into a programmatic mainstay, and a standout of the Boston ad tech scene. “The idea that you can wake up one day and wonder if it’s gone is terrifying,” he says. The questions of existential dread have mostly subsided, as people settle into their work-from-home routine. There are even […]
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Crisis Puts Amazon (And Ecommerce) In The Balance
Ecommerce is all about planning. It’s a carefully choreographed dance between manufacturing, warehousing and selling. But what happens when Amazon – and the world in general – has gone off the rails? It’s the nature of ecommerce and Amazon that tactics constantly change, said Sarah LaVallee, VP of client success at the ecommerce agency Channel […]
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Affiliate Marketing Is A Game Of Chutes And Ladders Right Now
Consumer buying habits are in flux. Need proof? Just look at the affiliate marketing category. Affiliate network Pepperjam is seeing “a dramatic shift” in how people shop,” said CEO Matt Gilbert. Between March 11 and March 16, just as the coronavirus crisis was really starting to crack wide open, Pepperjam’s sales volume, measured across about […]
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The Ad Industry Petitions Platforms For Payment Leniency As Cash Flow Dwindles
The ad tech industry is pressing Google, Facebook and Amazon to offer more flexible payment terms during the economic uncertainty caused by the coronavirus crisis. An industry petition on Change.org, whose author prefers to remain anonymous due to business conflicts, asks Facebook, Google and Amazon to offer more flexible payment terms during this crisis. The […]
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Google Tests Audience Buying In ADH, A Big Step From Analytics To Activation
Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH) started as a pure analytics and measurement service. But Google has been testing audience activation with a beta program for the past six months, according to AdExchanger sources who are in the program. The beta program includes large brands and agencies, and is currently only open to select clients that […]
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Starting As CMO During The COVID-19 Pandemic
One thing Adam Singer learned when he was looking for a job over the past six months or so, was that Fortune 500 businesses aren’t equipped for remote workforce management. One CMO didn’t feel comfortable hiring someone in Austin, where Singer moved this year, because she’d never managed someone remotely before. A well-funded tech startup […]
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NCS: Toilet Paper Hoarding Increased Sales 845%
We’ve all heard the anecdotes about people hoarding fortresses of toilet paper. And you’ve probably seen the empty store shelves where home and cleaning supplies used to sit. Now the numbers are coming in that give shape to those trends. Sales of toilet paper were up 845% last week compared to the month prior, according […]
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The OOH Renaissance Was Here – And Then There Was Coronavirus
2020 was going to be a breakout year for out-of-home media. GroupM forecasted 8% growth in the OOH category this year – the fastest-growing (and only growing) traditional media channel. And digital signage had finally reached meaningful scale and been integrated into major DSPs. While it’s still too early for updated OOH projections, the spread […]
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EMarketer Lowers Global Ad Spend Forecast Due To Coronavirus – And It Won’t Be The Last Time
EMarketer lowered its 2020 global ad spend forecast on Thursday, revising estimates down from $712 billion to $691.7 billion due to the coronavirus pandemic’s effect on media and commerce. That $20 billion global decline is actually an optimistic forecast, and the ad industry should expect more losses and another downward revision when eMarketer releases its […]