James Hercher
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
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James Hercher
Articles By James Hercher
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Del Monte CMO Elana Gold Talks Real-World And Media Supply Chains
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, Elana Gold took over the chief marketer role at Del Monte Fresh, one of the major US fruit and produce companies, with big plans to promote whole new product lines, like a […]
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Mediaocean Acquires 4C, Bridging Broadcast And Digital Walled Gardens
Mediaocean, the de facto software for most US TV advertising, has agreed to acquire the ad tech and analytics startup 4C on Monday for $150 million. 4C raised $31 million in two rounds, most recently in 2016 at a valuation of between $50 million and $100 million. Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise told AdExchanger the two […]
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Google Reclaims The DSP Crown In Latest Advertiser Perceptions Report
After slipping in the DSP rankings to Amazon over the past year, Google has reasserted its no. 1 status for self-serve, managed service and as advertisers’ preferred platform, according to the Q1 2020 Advertiser Perceptions DSP report released on Monday. The data is based on a survey of 347 brand marketers and agency buyers, split […]
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Button Unveils New Capabilities, As Affiliate Marketing Finally Advances
The mobile commerce marketing company Button on Wednesday unveiled a product suite called Evolution, including pilot partners Uber Eats, Groupon and BuzzFeed, with more tools for attribution and personalization. For some marketers, the word “affiliate” has such a reputation for banality, it’s like Voldemort — nobody wants to hear the name, said Button co-founder and […]
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How Amazon Is Winning The War For CTV Attribution
When advertisers think of the cutting edge of OTT advertising, they’re probably not thinking of Amazon as much as they are Roku, Hulu or YouTube. Despite having great video products, Amazon has not ballyhooed itself as a source for great video inventory. There’s not lot of inventory on Prime, for instance, and Twitch functions as […]
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Microsoft Enters The CDP Fray With Its Cloud Platform And Its Own Data
This is the eighth in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne, Amperity, Segment, ActionIQ, Lytics, Bluecore, Tealium, Optimove, Adobe, Treasure Data and BlueConic. Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s customer relationship product suite, has surged lately as it repositions itself as a customer data platform (CDP) competitor, which launched last year. Satish Thomas, a 14-year Microsoft veteran and […]
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Mark Zagorski Named CEO Of DoubleVerify To Lead Its CTV Charge
Ad tech vet Mark Zagorski will be the new CEO of ad verification company DoubleVerify starting July 21, the company said Thursday. Zagorski and DoubleVerify declined to comment. The CEO position at DoubleVerify opened up in early March, when its previous leader Wayne Gattinella resigned after The New York Post published a salacious article about […]
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OPINION: On TV & VideoHow Canceling The Timbersports TV Series Forced Stihl Out Of Its Comfort Zone
The Stihl Timbersports series was already a case study on successful sports marketing. Now the chainsaw and outdoor equipment manufacturer hopes to set another example for how classic TV events will transition to online video and streaming. Stihl created the Timbersports Series in 1985. It was picked up by ESPN, then a plucky broadcast startup, […]
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Cadillac CMO Melissa Grady On Marketing Lessons Learned In Quarantine
Cadillac was teed up for an exciting 2020. The company has a fleet of new vehicles, including a new Sedan line and a new Escalade, which debuted in February as part of a campaign with the Oscars. A few weeks later and, well, you know the story. But Cadillac isn’t doom and gloom about its […]
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AdExchanger Politics: Throwing A Wrench Into The Voter Registration Machinery
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. 2020 was shaping up to be a huge year for US voter registration. The pace of new voters registered in January and […]
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OPINION: On TV & VideoHow QuickFrame Is Capitalizing On Digital Media’s Long-Awaited Transition To Video
For years, advertisers and publishers waited for a transition to video that always glinted right around the corner. Promises of Facebook video revenue didn’t materialize. And ad-supported OTT viewership lagged. But in the past year or so, the switch has finally flipped for video, said Spencer Weinman, CRO of the content production agency and video […]
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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 […]