Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Dynamic Yield CEO On How Retailers Can Catch Up With Digital Personalization
Your experience scrolling your social media feed will be very different from your friend’s. But when you go into a retail store, you’ll have the same experience as everyone else who steps in. So while digital-first companies like Amazon and eBay are built to create personalized experiences, brick-and-mortar retailers are not, said Liad Agmon, founder […]
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Alphabet Reveals YouTube Revenue – $15B in 2019 – And More Granular Data
YouTube drove $15 billion in ad revenue in fiscal 2019, according to Alphabet’s Q4 and FY results, released Monday. Read the release. This is the first time Google has disclosed YouTube’s revenues, which have grown briskly over the past three years – from $8.2 billion in 2017 and $11.2 billion in 2018. Alphabet will now […]
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How Pepsi Proves It’s Worth Going All-In On Super Bowl Marketing
A 30-second Super Bowl spot costs $5 million, and could be seen by 100 million live viewers. Depending on your perspective, it could be either the greatest opportunity or the biggest waste of the year. We know one brand’s perspective, at least. PepsiCo, a long-time Super Bowl partner, is back in force this year with […]
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Walmart Media Group Tests Xandr And The Trade Desk For DSP Role
Walmart Media Group (WMG), the retailer’s advertising business, is running a bake-off between Xandr and The Trade Desk to be its DSP partner for off-site advertising. Xandr and The Trade Desk each supported sponsored product campaigns for Walmart in Q4 last year, with the goal to drive site traffic at the lowest cost per click […]
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Amazon Emphasizes Brand Advertising Ambitions In Q4 Earnings
Amazon’s advertising business grew by about 40% year over year, in line with the annual growth of the overall “Other” segment, CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors during the company’s Q4 and year end 2019 earnings call Thursday. Advertising revenue is still a drop in the bucket compared to the $280.5 billion the entire company brought […]
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Google Extends A Hand To Programmatic As Its Privacy Rules Shake Up The Industry
As Google’s new data privacy policies roil the industry, the company’s ad tech and ad network businesses appear to be more open to industry collaboration in response. For instance, Google is coming around to some industry initiatives where it’s been a notable holdout. In spring of 2020, Google will implement Sellers.json, an IAB Tech Lab-backed […]
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Ad Tech Vets Look To Bring Their Data Expertise To Actual Vets
Ad tech expertise is increasingly finding its way out of the advertising industry and into seemingly unrelated verticals. The most recent example is Petabyte, a veterinarian and pet industry technology company that launched last month. The company’s initial product is a vet clinic management solution called Rhapsody. Petabyte CEO Michael Hyman and President Tim Mahlman […]
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How Oracle’s Rob Tarkoff Will Win The Next Stage Of Data And Ad Tech
Rob Tarkoff, EVP, Oracle CX and Data Cloud, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020. Oracle’s data division has had a tumultuous year. Eric Roza, Oracle Data Cloud chief, left last April, and was replaced by Rob Tarkoff, who ran the customer experience (CX) cloud unit. The data […]
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DoubleVerify Takes A Crack At CTV Fraud With New Supply Certification
DoubleVerify introduced a certification program on Tuesday to detect CTV fraud and invalid traffic. The exploding prices of streaming impressions have been a beacon for fraud, said Roy Rosenfeld, SVP of product management and head of DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab. “And there’s an opportunity for fraudsters because CTV as a medium and how ads are delivered […]
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As Election Nears, Ad Tech Looks Toward New Opportunities – And To Avoid Past Mistakes
With the 2020 US presidential election cycle heating up, advertising and technology companies are once again jockeying to secure their share of the coming deluge of political media budgets. But the commercial tech crowd is taking a more judicious approach to political advertising this time around, having learned some hard lessons in 2015 and 2016, […]
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Havas Tests Zeotap And InfoSum Data Partnership As Agencies Enter Onboarding
Brands are eager to onboard and match data sets, but don’t want first-party data to leave their own systems. They want user-level targeting, without the risk in trafficking actual consumer data. Zeotap and InfoSum are tackling this data paradox with an onboarding partnership, announced on Monday, that allows marketers and agencies to sync data from […]
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Facebook Holds Firm On Political Ad Policies, Will Still Allow Lies And Targeting
Facebook clarified its political advertising policy on Thursday. And the update is: No update. Facebook has been at the center of a PR and policy firestorm over its political advertising policies since October, when President Trump’s reelection campaign ran an ad featuring a lie about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. At the same […]
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How Sperry Entered The World Of Athlete Influencers
It’s easy for a major advertiser like Allstate Insurance to pay up for a mega athlete like Aaron Rodgers. But if you’re a smaller brand, such as the shoe manufacturer Sperry, it can be difficult to find the right athletes who won’t break your budget, but who still have the cachet to boost your brand. […]
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Meredith Acquires Product Recommendation And Affiliate Network SwearBy
The women’s lifestyle media company Meredith is advancing its commerce strategy another step with the acquisition of SwearBy, an affiliate marketing platform used by women to save and recommend products. The deal, which will be announced Thursday morning at CES, is Meredith’s second affiliate-focused acquisition in the past year, following its purchase of Linfield Media, […]
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Tremor Acquires Unruly From News Corp, Further Bridging Buy And Sell Sides
Video ad tech company Tremor said Monday it will acquire the outstream video advertising platform Unruly from News Corp. In exchange, News Corp gets a 6.9% equity stake in Tremor, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, giving News Corp about $20 million worth of Tremor stock, based on the video advertising company’s $275 […]
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Instagram’s US User Growth Rate Dips In Latest eMarketer Report
Instagram’s US user growth rate sharply decelerated last year, from 10.1% in 2018 to 6.7% in 2019, according to eMarketer’s latest social benchmark report. EMarketer is also lowering its Instagram growth forecast, revised down from 5.4% to 4.5% in 2020, and 3.2% instead of 4.1% in 2021. The main reason why Instagram’s growth forecast in […]
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The Year To Come In Online Data And Identity
2019 brought a tsunami of change to data-driven advertising. And those changes have overflowed into other part of businesses and the economy, as regulators scrutinize the world of digital advertising. Facebook gave the boot to third-party data suppliers. And in 2020, Google says it will make good on a long-held promise to revoke its advertising […]
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The Year In M&A: Broadcasters And Brands Buy In, And Old-School Ad Tech Exits
This was a major year in ad tech deal making. Many deals were opportunistic or outright fire sales, as early programmatic players like Sizmek, Rocket Fuel and IgnitionOne reached the end of the line. Ad tech and data deals were helped by a surge among public company bellwethers The Trade Desk, Cardlytics, LiveRamp, Telaria and […]
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Five Things You Need To Know About The Rubicon-Telaria Merger
Michael Barrett has had his eye on Telaria since his first day as CEO of Rubicon Project in March, 2017, when the company was Tremor Video and was led by then-CEO Paul Caine. But, like with many relationships, Rubicon and Telaria needed to “do a little work on ourselves” before they were fit partners, said […]
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IAB Tech Lab Releases Blockchain Implementation Guide
Blockchain has passed through the wild ride of the early hype cycle, and its advocates are readying for a more mature period of implementation. The IAB Tech Lab Blockchain Working Group on Thursday published its first guidelines for implementing blockchain tech in digital advertising. Hilary Chapman-Roberts, a GroupM product marketing manager and co-chair of Tech […]
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Publisher Tech Player Smart Acquires DSP Liquid M
Smart, a publisher ad server and exchange, is growing out of its supply-side roots with the acquisition of the DSP Liquid M, the company said on Wednesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Liquid M is a relatively small DSP, with a little over $10 million in revenue this year and 20-25 employees, according […]
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Amazon To Drop Dataxu From Fire TV DSP Service
Amazon Publisher Services (APS) will remove dataxu from its Fire TV third-party DSP service, according to sources with knowledge of the change. APS opened its Fire TV inventory to third-party DSPs for the first time five months ago with integrations with The Trade Desk and dataxu. Less than two months after dataxu was acquired by […]
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What’s In A Currency? Nielsen Releases Converged Linear And Smart TV Metric
Nielsen released a measurement solution on Friday that combines the demographic data from its TV audience panel, the People Meter, with Gracenote’s ACR data based on four million US households with LG smart TVs. The data service, which opens to all buyers and broadcasters beginning in January, will mark the first time Nielsen has merged […]
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Why Toyota Loves Distracted TV Audiences
When a Toyota commercial airs, Vinay Shahani, the company’s North America VP of integrated marketing operations, knows that most people who see it aren’t in market for a car. So the company looks at search activity to assess the value of its TV ad spend. Using data and analytics company EDO, Toyota can measure web […]
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Verizon Media Brings DOOH Supply To SSP, Completing Its Stack For Outdoor Screens
Verizon Media, the telco giant’s ad tech and content unit, added digital out-of-home (DOOH) supply to its SSP on Tuesday. The SSP launch completes Verizon’s full-stack DOOH offering, having launched a DSP solution for outdoor media buys earlier this year. Verizon also has a network called Verizon Digital Signage, a collection of 3,000 interactive screens […]
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The IAB Finalizes CCPA Framework As Industry Readies For More Regulators
The IAB on Thursday released its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance framework, the legal and technical mechanism for using ad-targeting data or first-party publisher data in programmatic advertising. It also released a legal agreement meant to accompany the compliance framework. Get it all here. The finished framework comes only two weeks after it first […]
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GroupM Sees Highest Ad Spend Growth Rate Since 2000. Can It Last?
The United States advertising market is inching up to the quarter-trillion dollar mark. Total ad spend in the United States will reach $244 billion this year, a 6.2% bump from 2018, according to GroupM’s annual media forecast. That’s a very strong growth rate – the highest since 2000 – but it could also be the […]
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Ad Buyers Starting To Use The Trade Desk DSP Over Google, According To Advertiser Perceptions Report
Google’s Display and Video 360 demand-side platform is in a tough fight as offerings from Amazon and The Trade Desk equal or exceed Google’s usage rates, according to Advertiser Perceptions’ quarterly tracking report. The report surveys 314 media executives, split between brands and agencies, about their opinions of the major buying platforms. The report tracks […]
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Can Amazon Be King? How The Ecommerce Leader Could Surpass The Duopoly
Amazon has become the indisputable number three digital ad platform, after Google and Facebook. But while the possibility of Amazon’s advertising business unseating the duopoly has been percolating, can it really surpass either Google or Facebook as an ad industry titan? The numbers are … discouraging, at least in the short term. Google is just […]
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New Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Adam Blitzer Doubles Down On CDP
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is crowning a new leader. Longtime Salesforce vet Adam Blitzer will take the CEO reins from Bob Stutz this month. But the business strategy will remain the same: customer data platform (CDP) all the way. Salesforce introduced its CDP service, called “Customer 360,” in June, and Blitzer colored in more detail […]