Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Rubicon Project Grows Revenue To $37.9 Million With Positive RTB Trends
Rubicon Project took in $37.9 million in Q2 2019, up by almost a third from the same period last year, according to the company’s earnings report on Wednesday. Rubicon was cash flow positive for the second consecutive quarter, but still had a net loss of $8.3 million. Though that figure is down from Q2 2018, […]
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As Marketers Tire Of Last-Click And MTA, Incrementality Testing Finds Its Niche
Data-driven marketers don’t like last-click attribution, which simply credits only the final impression that drove a conversion. And they aren’t buying multitouch attribution (MTA), an involved process where each touchpoint in a campaign is tracked and assigned specific credit. So where does the media measurement pendulum settle between those options? For some attribution experts, the […]
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Amazon’s Deals With The Trade Desk And Dataxu Bring RTB To CTV
When Amazon opened its Fire TV video advertising supply to outside demand for the first time, with The Trade Desk and dataxu as inaugural DSP partners, it broke new ground in programmatic CTV. The partnerships enable buyers on The Trade Desk, dataxu and Amazon’s own DSP to access Fire TV impressions exclusively through a private […]
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Amazon’s Profit Takes A Hit Due To Investments, Including Its Ad Platform
Amazon earned $63.9 billion across its retail, cloud computing, subscription and ad sales businesses in Q2 2019, a 20% increase from the same period last year, the company reported on Thursday. Those are eye-popping totals, but the ecommerce giant’s profitability is actually down from the three previous quarters, bringing an end to a profit growth […]
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Bully Pulpit Interactive Adds Another Obama Vet And Gears Up For An Ad-Heavy Cycle
Digital media and advertising expertise is moving up the political campaign hierarchy. The most direct example is Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s director of digital in 2016, who was made campaign manager for the 2020 reelection effort. But digital advertising is now the largest media expenditure for every major campaign on both sides of the […]
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PreciseTarget Exits Stealth Mode With Aggregated Retail Data Solutions
PreciseTarget publicly launched its first retail audience data segments on LiveRamp on Friday. PreciseTarget ingests audience and transaction data from more than 200 retail partners, primarily brick-and-mortar companies. It then anonymizes the data and packages audiences based on taste affiliations, like men who wear mid-priced vacation clothing or women who purchase expensive cosmetics. General taste […]
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Three Ways Amazon Stays A Step Ahead On Prime Day
Prime Day has grown out of Amazon to become a general shopping holiday. Monday and Tuesday were the third ever two-day period with more than $2 billion in online shopping in the U.S., aside from the Thanksgiving holiday week, according to Adobe data. Only Memorial Day weekend this year and Labor Day 2018 had similar […]
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Amperity Raises $50 Million As Mar Tech Heavyweights Turn To CDPs
Customer data platform (CDP) Amperity announced a $50 million investment round on Monday, bringing its total funding to almost $90 million. A cohort of large venture capital investors, including Tiger Global Management and Goldman Sachs, backed the new Amperity round. “What I think many industry observers see is the opportunity for a multi-billion dollar, blue […]
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The Rise And Fall And Rise Of The Global CMO
For decades, the global CMO role has been the pinnacle of the marketing career pyramid, because the largest brands, like Mars, Coca-Cola and Unilever, needed a single executive to oversee content and messaging across the portfolio. But the days of the global CMO may be nearing an end. Coca-Cola scrapped its global CMO role late […]
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Zeta Takes Over PlaceIQ’s Advertising Business And Marches Into Media
Zeta Global, the marketing tech and data cloud, announced a strategic partnership with the location data company PlaceIQ on Thursday that will see Zeta take over PlaceIQ’s managed media business, including more than 20 employees. Zeta has its roots in CRM, but has taken big strides into media buying this year, taking over Visto’s managed […]
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The Companies Challenging LiveRamp’s Supremacy In Data Onboarding
LiveRamp pioneered data onboarding, the technology to match anonymized online user cookies and mobile IDs to real-world consumers and offline data. But now, LiveRamp must contend with rivals following the trail it blazed. LiveRamp executed a neat financial pirouette last year, when it re-listed on the stock exchange with a market cap of more than […]
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IAB Tech Lab Releases Data Transparency Standard, With Audits To Give It ‘Teeth’
The IAB Tech Lab on Thursday released a new standardization system for third-party audience data and an auditing and credentialing program for data sellers. The effort to bring transparency to third-party data segments has “had a few lives” within the IAB, said Dennis Buchheim, the Tech Lab’s general manager. The longtime problem is that when […]
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Three Things DTCs Have Learned As They Get Into TV
Ecommerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are flooding into television, and bring a new data-driven perspective to the old media channel. While legacy brands have pre-existing preferences for specific programs or media channels and for gross ratings points (GRPs), DTC startups are uniquely suited to bring digital tactics to TV advertising. “The result for legacy brands is […]
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LiveRamp To Buy TV Analytics Startup Data Plus Math For $150 Million
LiveRamp said Monday it has agreed to acquire the television analytics company Data Plus Math for a cash and stock deal worth $150 million. It’s a strong exit for Data Plus Math, which has raised $7.5 million over two rounds since 2016, and has about 20 employees. And the acquisition gives LiveRamp a strong foothold […]
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How The New Salesforce CDP Could Consolidate Cloud Marketing
Salesforce has big plans for its recently released customer data platform (CDP), Customer 360. The world’s largest CRM and DMP provider is reimagining what enterprise customers need in their mar tech toolkit, Salesforce Marketing Cloud CEO Bob Stutz told AdExchanger at the company’s Connections conference in Chicago this week. Salesforce considers its CDP product to […]
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Salesforce Gets Serious About CDPs With Revamped Customer 360 Product
Salesforce officially threw its hat into the ring with the launch of a customer data platform (CDP) on Tuesday at its Connections conference in Chicago. Salesforce has been circling a CDP launch for the past year, since its $800 million acquisition of Datorama, a data integration service, and the launch of an internal identity graph […]
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The DSP Market Shakeup Starts To Settle In Latest Advertiser Perceptions Report
The demand-side platform (DSP) market has been in flux for the past few years, with the crowded field thinning into a handful of contenders that are “in the money,” said Kevin Mannion, chief strategy officer at the market research firm Advertiser Perceptions. And the DSP market is finally hitting that homestretch. In the latest Advertiser […]
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Salesforce To Buy Tableau For $15.7 Billion, Expanding Its Integration Toolkit
Salesforce has agreed to acquire the data reporting and analytics company Tableau for $15.7 billion, the enterprise cloud giant said Monday. The deal comes less than a week after Google bought Looker, one of Tableau’s main cloud analytics competitors, for $2.6 billion. So Salesforce and Google have consolidated large shares of the independent analytics market. […]
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Google’s DV360 Starts Selling Linear TV Inventory For The First Time
Google is selling linear television inventory with Display & Video 360, its demand-side platform (DSP), via a beta partnership with the TV industry ad tech company WideOrbit. “The feedback we’ve most consistently heard from clients is how challenging it’s become to reach their audiences,” said Eve Goldman, Google’s director of global YouTube and video solutions. […]
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Weborama Makes Late Bid For The Sizmek Ad Server And DCO
One week after Amazon reached a “definitive agreement” to buy the Sizmek ad server and DCO tech, the French ad tech company Weborama is trying Friday to re-open the process with a press release and what it claims is a larger offer. FTI Consulting, the financial advisory overseeing Sizmek’s bankruptcy review, emphasized its agreement with […]
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OPINION: On TV & VideoRoku Vet Jim Lombard On How Tetra TV Gains Inventory And Trust As A CTV Ad Network
If mobile and display advertising was the first stage of programmatic technology, connected TV (CTV) and broadcast advertising could be considered the second. But there is one big question: Will ad networks – a mainstay of early digital programmatic display advertising – spring up in the data-driven TV tech ecosystem? One early contender in […]
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How Sizmek DCO Fits Into Amazon’s Ad Platform Play
When Amazon acquired Sizmek’s ad server and dynamic content optimization (DCO) businesses last week, most of the attention fell on the server. And rightly so, since the server is the meat and potatoes of the deal. But don’t sleep on the DCO solution as a potentially valuable asset for the Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP). After […]