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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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 […]
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SpotX Hires Programmatic Vet Neal Richter For Chief Scientist Role
Neal Richter, who spent two years as Rakuten Marketing CTO, is headed to SpotX as the company’s first ever chief scientist. Richter is one of the early tech leaders in programmatic, helping to develop all three openRTB specs released by the IAB, as well as online ad authorization industry initiatives like Ads.txt and Sellers.json. As […]
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Amazon To Acquire Sizmek Ad Server And DCO Business
Updated at 11:50 EDT Amazon announced on Friday that it will buy Sizmek’s ad server business and dynamic content optimization (DCO) solution, following a two-month sales review since Sizmek declared bankruptcy in March. The deal would give Amazon the second-largest ad server footprint, trailing Google, and has important implications for Amazon’s advertising ambitions and the […]
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Signal Names Lisa Weinstein New CEO To Seize Momentum In Data Onboarding
The onboarding and identity data startup Signal said Thursday it has hired Lisa Weinstein, previously the CEO of Curiosity.com, as its new president and CEO. Weinstein is succeeding Mike Sands, a co-founder of the company, who will remain on the board as executive chairman. Signal has raised more than $80 million since it was founded […]
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The Trade Desk’s First-Ever CRO Looks To Capture Lightning In A Bottle (Again)
When Jonathan Carson became The Trade Desk’s first-ever chief revenue officer last week, the company was at an inflection point. The Trade Desk has soared since its IPO, going from just a shy of billion in value in 2016 to about $9 billion now. To date, however, The Trade Desk has succeeded primarily by consolidating […]
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LiveRamp Boosts Growth Rate And Data, As It Tries To Nail Online Identity
LiveRamp earned $78.3 million in the second quarter, a 30% increase from $60.2 million in the same period last year, according to its earnings report released Tuesday. The company’s gross profit also grew year over year, from $36.4 million to $40.6 million. LiveRamp is still shaking off the blow from Facebook’s third-party data prohibition. The […]