Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
-
Facebook And Ad Platforms Reckon With Lying In Political Ads
Lying in digital advertisements has become a flashpoint in US politics this year. A running dispute between Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Facebook ratcheted up this weekend, after the Massachusetts senator posted an ad on the social platform featuring a lie that Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Donald Trump for reelection. “You’re probably […]
-
Kibo Buys Monetate In Its Vista-Backed Bid To Be The Next Ecom Cloud
The ecommerce technology company Kibo is acquiring Monetate, a brand personalization and content optimization startup, the company announced on Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though Monetate had raised $46 million since 2008. Kibo was launched in 2016 when Vista Equity Partners, a leading mar tech private equity fund, bought and consolidated three […]
-
OPINION: On TV & VideoDataxu’s Mike Baker: Scaling A DSP In A New World Dominated By TV
The programmatic ecosystem’s maturation into the television industry happened slowly before speeding up rapidly. Dataxu is a fitting example of the trend. The longstanding demand-side platform (DSP) has reshaped its business and client mix in the past two years. Once a pure-play DSP, dataxu now has supply-side deals that put it in the tech stacks […]
-
Hulu Moves To First-Price Auctions For Its OTT Inventory
Hulu will switch to a first-price auction for its programmatic private marketplace next week. The streaming service told advertisers and tech partners of the shift in an email sent on Monday. All the DSP partners in Hulu’s invite-only private marketplace will be certified to bid under the new auction terms. Not all of Hulu’s inventory […]
-
Google Ad Frequency Feature Shows The New Reality Of Browser Tracking
Google will roll out a feature for its Display & Video 360 (DV360) DSP over the next few weeks that will allow marketers to control ad frequency even when third-party cookies aren’t available. In a blog post published Tuesday, ads privacy product manager Rahul Srinivasan described how this new frequency-capping tool will look at traffic […]
-
OpenAP Launches Platform That Buys Across NBCU, Viacom And Fox
OpenAP, the TV advertising and analytics joint venture between Viacom, Fox and NBCUniversal, released on Tuesday its first commercial product, called the OpenAP Market, a campaign planning and buying tool that works across the company’s three broadcast backers. The market product lets advertisers upload data and targeting paramaters, like a brand’s first-party CRM data or […]
-
IPG Launches The Data Services Brand Kinesso, Its First Acxiom-Based Business
IPG threw its hat in the crowded ring of tech and data service hybrids Monday with the debut of Kinesso. The new business will encompass the agency ad tech unit Cadreon, the internal data hub AMP and the Mediabrands Data and Technology group. With between 500 and 600 employees in the new business, Kinesso will […]
-
How We Got Here: A Look Back At The Privacy Changes That Reshaped Google
As privacy concerns and antitrust actions have dominated the market, Google has reshaped its business to meet new standards set by governments and consumers. In some ways, this is truly a new Google. Well-known products like AdX and the DoubleClick suite are gone, replaced by products like Ads Data Hub, Marketing Platform, Ad Manager and […]
-
MediaMath Targets Supply Chain Transparency With SOURCE Framework
MediaMath launched on Wednesday a digital media-buying framework called SOURCE to give advertisers, publishers and every vendor in between visibility across the supply chain. MediaMath has assembled a roster of partners for the initiative that span the ecosystem. They include Havas Media and its own advertising customers, SSPs Rubicon Project and Telaria, news publishers such […]
-
Elizabeth Warren’s Campaign Is The New Data-Driven Model
Initially, it seemed fair to wonder whether Elizabeth Warren’s campaign could survive a long, grueling primary. The Warren campaign raised $6 million in the first quarter of the year, fifth most in the field, according to campaign disclosures released earlier this year. But it spent almost as much building up the operation, with 160 people […]
-
Tapad CEO On Cross-Device Graphs And Where Its Data Comes From (Hint: Not Telenor)
The cross-device company Tapad was an early mover in an ongoing trend where ad tech data companies divest themselves of their media sales businesses. In January 2018, Tapad – owned by the Norwegian telco Telenor – offloaded its DSP to Brand Networks, and since then, its peers like Drawbridge and PlaceIQ have attempted similar pirouettes. […]
-
FanDuel Bids For First-Party Data And Audiences With New Content Play
FanDuel isn’t waiting for US states to move the ball forward on sports betting regulations. Last year, the company launched a fantasy sports property, The Duel, that reaches search audiences, despite the search platforms’ anti-gaming policies, and has become a powerful data source. FanDuel has been developing The Duel with Minute Media, a hybrid sports […]
-
Zeta Global Signs A Deal With IgnitionOne For Its DSP Business
Zeta Global continued its annexation of the demand-side platform (DSP) category on Wednesday, closing a deal with IgnitionOne to take over as its default DSP. The deal also includes the transfer of some employees and accounts, primarily attached to small and mid-size brands. Terms were not disclosed. “It’s an expensive proposition to run a DSP […]
-
Zenith Forecasts $45B In Video Ads This Year, But TV Is Still King
Online video ad spend will total $45 billion this year, up from $37 billion last year, and is expected to exceed $61 billion by 2021, according to Zenith’s Online Video Forecasts 2019 report published on Monday. Video advertising will also set the pace for global advertising, growing at 18% per year compared to 10% for […]
-
Ad Tech Vet Jason Kelly Brings Programmatic Mindset To Airline Industry
Jason Kelly is returning to his old stomping grounds, the flight travel industry, with the launch of an airline revenue management system (RMS) called Kambr, backed by a $4 million funding round. Kelly spent a decade managing online sales and revenue for airlines before getting into advertising technology in 2007 with Rapt, a digital monetization […]
-
What Headwinds? Ad Tech Stocks Are Surging This Year
Amid fears of a recession and wild swings in the stock market, advertising technology companies are enjoying a renaissance. Since the start of 2019, shares of the video ad tech company Telaria have more than doubled in value, from below $4 to $10.45 as of this week. Rubicon Project also started the year trading below […]
-
DSPolitical: With Political Ad Dollars Beckoning, Commercial Players Face A Reality Check
Mark Jablonowski will present “How To Capture 2020 Political Ad Budgets” at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference on October 15-16. Political campaigns spent $9.8 billion on advertising in the 2016 election cycle, up only $400 million from 2012. But political ads are expected to rocket up almost to $13 billion by November 2020, […]
-
Spend Money To Make Money: How Big Tech Powers Global Ad Growth
The world’s biggest technology companies have become some of the biggest ad spenders. Although other global brands continue to grow their ad spend at a moderate rate, they don’t benefit from the same incentives as internet brands, which earn as they spend. Legacy categories are hampered by an awkward dynamic: Risk losing digital consumers by […]
-
Amazon Is Testing A Clean Room Service, Giving Advertisers Access To New Data Sets
Amazon is developing clean room data technology that could improve measurement and data for ad campaigns, according to sources familiar with the product. The idea is similar to other clean room offerings, like Google’s Ads Data Hub (ADH) or Facebook’s enterprise data-sharing service, which enable advertisers to measure campaigns or mingle their first-party data with […]
-
IAB Launches A Consent Framework That Google Will (Finally) Join Next Year
The IAB Tech Lab and IAB Europe on Tuesday released the second version of the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF), the collaborative industry solution for conducting targeted advertising in compliance with GDPR. Google has committed to its long-awaited integration with the framework by the end of Q1 2020. The TCF initially was a feature included […]
-
Omnicom Jumps On LinkedIn Audience API For Platform Data It Can Actually Use
Two days after LinkedIn announced its Audience Engagement API, Omnicom has released a product built around it – an analytics tool called “Professional Audiences.” Omnicom released its B2B analytics tool Thursday, and it’s designed to help creative, business development and media teams generate insights for campaigns or pitches, said Slavi Samardzija, global CEO of Annalect, […]
-
PubMatic Sees Early Returns With The Trade Desk’s Unified ID, But Can We All Just Get Along?
In the race to be the open internet’s default cookie-based advertising ID, The Trade Desk has jumped out to an early head start. The Trade Desk has allowed other ad tech companies to freely sync with its cookie pool for years, and last year it fully commercialized that product with the launch of the unified […]
-
GumGum Grows Leadership Team, As Industry Focuses On Contextual Ad Tech
GumGum, the image recognition tech startup, announced two C-level appointments on Monday as the company sharpens its focus on contextual advertising technology. Patrick Gildea, the former CFO of Gracenote, has joined GumGum as financial chief, and Ben Plomion was promoted to chief growth officer. Ad tech companies have seized on contextual targeting largely because audience […]
-
Democrats Are Flooding Facebook With Ads And Paying Crazy Money For New Donors
When the Democratic National Committee (DNC) introduced individual donor thresholds earlier this year for candidates to qualify for primary debates, it was trying to empower campaigns with grassroots support. But these new rules have also created a massive online audience acquisition spree. The first round of debates was relatively easy to qualify for – with […]
-
The Trade Desk Grows Q2 Revenue To $160 Million And Grows Into Industry Power Role
Late last year, analysts questioned whether The Trade Desk could keep pace with runaway growth forecasts, after it rocketed from a $1 billion company in 2016 to $6 billion. Less than a year later, The Trade Desk continues to beat expectations. Its Q2 revenue grew by 42% year over year to $159.9 million, according to […]
-
Nike Buys Analytics Firm Celect. Are Retailers The Next Mar Tech Acquirers?
Nike continues to build out its digital platforms. On Wednesday, the athletic apparel giant revealed it had purchased the analytics startup Celect for an undisclosed price. Read the release. Celect marks Nike’s second analytics acquisition, following its 2018 purchase of customer analytics startup Zodiac Metrics, which was folded into Nike’s data science group, now led […]
-
Comscore’s Q2 Revenue Declines Again As It Narrows Vision On TV
Comscore is reeling. Interim CEO Dale Fuller acknowledged as much to investors Tuesday when the company reported its second quarter earnings. Comscore has slimmed down to focus on emerging categories in advanced television, including “under-addressable” television, which is more measurable linear content, and cross-platform ratings for digital video, video on demand and TV. But will […]
-
LiveRamp Grows Revenue By A Third, But Still Needs More From Data Sales
LiveRamp reported revenues totaling $83 million in the company’s quarterly earnings on Monday, up 32% from the period last year. LiveRamp’s revenue is split into two buckets, the core data onboarding subscription product and a “Marketplace & Other” category, which includes one-off data sales and features upsold by the company, like ad metrics that attribute […]
-
PE Backers And Sizmek Vets Take Over Peer39, Sizmek’s Contextual Data Biz
The Sizmek bankruptcy auction officially closed on Thursday with the announcement that Peer39, the company’s contextual targeting unit, was sold to the private equity firm O3 Industries for $18 million. The Trade Desk and Zefr, a contextual targeting company primarily for YouTube, also submitted bids for the final Peer39 auction last week, according to sources […]
-
OPINION: On TV & VideoWhere Elgin Thompson Places His Bets In TV Ad Tech And Analytics
It’s a safe bet that the next generation of TV advertising and analytics will be an incredibly lucrative category. But that’s about the only safe bet anyone can make. “There are a lot of question marks around this space,” said Elgin Thompson, managing director of technology investment banking at JMP Securities. There are fundamental questions […]