Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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The Trade Desk and Acxiom Deepen Their UID2 Collaboration With An AI-Powered Measurement Solution
The Trade Desk and Acxiom have a new product that plugs into Kokai to create a live feedback loop between UID2 IDs and real-world outcomes.
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Why Shipt, The Target-Owned Same-Day Delivery Service, Added Yahoo As Its DSP
Last year, Shipt went hunting for a DSP, eyeing new programmatic reach and hyper-local targeting down to the ZIP code.
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Best Buy Ads Dives Into Programmatic
Best Buy Ads, the consumer electronics chain’s retail media arm, on Tuesday announced a slate of new partnerships and new ad tech features that push it further into ad tech and data services.
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Amazon Expands Its Programmatic Integration With SiriusXM
On Tuesday, Amazon DSP announced an expanded integration with satellite radio company SiriusXM.
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Retail Media Is Starting To Come To Grips With The Fact That We All Know Nothing
Retail media is entering what might be called its Socratic phase. The closer we to get to understanding an ad campaign’s real impact and business results, the clearer it is that we have no idea how this thing works.
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Google Search Ads 360 Adds Criteo As First On-Site Retail Media Supply Partner
Criteo announced a partnership with Google Search Ads 360 (SA360), Google’s enterprise search advertising platform, making Criteo the first third-party vendor to integrate with Google for on-site retail media supply.
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Google’s Proposed Fix To Its Ad Tech Monopoly Is At Odds With The DOJ’s Remedies
Late Friday evening, Google filed its proposed remedies to its ad tech monopoly to District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema, and unsurprisingly, they’re rather mild – and very different from what the Department of Justice is looking for.
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Honey Co-Founder Ryan Hudson Has A New Plan For An AI Ad Network
This week, the AdExchanger Commerce Media Newsletter spotlights ZeroClick, an ad network for AI chatbot products launched by a group of familiar faces in the world of ecommerce and ad tech.
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The Media And Retail Deals Behind The Peppa Pig Franchise Expansion
Peppa Pig is everywhere. Whether or not you have children, you likely know the little girl pig from the kid’s cartoon show. But the Peppa media franchise is just getting started.
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Why Big Brand Price Increases Will Flatten Ad Budgets
Product prices and marketing budgets are flip sides of the same coin. But the phase-in effects of tariffs, combined with vicissitudes of global weather and commodity production, challenge that truism.
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MX8 Labs Launches With A Plan To Speed Up The Survey-Based Research Biz
What’s the point of a market research survey that could take weeks, when consumer sentiment is rollercoasting up and down every day? That’s the problem MX8 Labs aims to tackle.
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Investors Sour On Programmatic After The Trade Desk Fumbles A Question About Amazon
When The Trade Desk sneezes, ad tech catches a cold.
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The Startup Trying To Automate The Ad Platform Reconciliation And Refund Mess
The ad tech startup Vaudit, founded last year by Mike Hahn, aims to automate the process of campaign reconciliation atop major ad platforms.
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The Trade Desk Lays Out Its Case To Beat Walled Gardens. Does Wall Street Buy It?
The Trade Desk continued its shaky 2025 earnings schedule when it reported Q2 results on Thursday.
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Zillow Pilots Containerized RTB, As It Rethinks The Equation Of Quality And Cost
Zillow is the pilot brand advertiser to test a new programmatic buying strategy known as containerized RTB. The strategy embeds the DSP or ad-buying platform intelligence, in this case the startup Chalice Custom Algorithms, within the SSP, which is Index Exchange.
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Shell Shutters Its Volta EV Charging And Media Division
Volta Media, which is owned by the gas station and energy giant Shell, will be shuttered by November and its network of more than 2,000 charging stations will be dismantled this year.
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More Like No Yield: A New Book Explores How Google Soaked Up The Web’s Ad Profits
“I tried to write it so it’s not exclusively for ad tech nerds,” Ari Paparo told AdExchanger of his new book, about Google’s advertising dominance. “And I mean that affectionately.”
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The Soda Wars Are Over And Big Beverage Companies Won. Now What?
For a moment, it seemed that beverage aisles and refrigerator sections in chains across the country were cracking open for startups and independent brands to compete with Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper.
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Criteo Reports Flattish Q2 Earnings And Looks To Improve Its Total ‘Activated Media Spend’
Criteo’s Q2 earnings report on Wednesday was marked by flatness.
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Why You Should Know (And Use) The Marketing Efficiency Ratio Metric
The Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is a data-driven advertising metric that’s been around for many years but is now reaching mainstream, or to some at least, revered status.
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FC Barcelona Gets An AI-Powered Assist To Help With Everything From Marketing To Player Fitness
FC Barcelona is giving the beautiful game an AI-powered upgrade.
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Alphabet’s Revenue Skyrockets, And AI Overviews Gobble More Of The Search Pie
The web is hurting. Google is doing splendidly. Q2 was a “standout,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told investors on Tuesday, with “robust growth across the company.”
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Meet Blurbs, The Latest Startup Trying To Actually Explain What Programmatic Vendors Do
Although there are tens of thousands of vendors across the Lumascape, helpfully bucketed by dozens of three-letter acronyms (CDPs, DMPs, SSPs, etc.) ) – nobody has any idea what anybody does. And it’s not like press releases help.
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Prime Day Grows Up
This year’s Amazon Prime Day event stood out in a couple important ways. One is the blasé results of Prime Day; the other is the guerilla pricing tactics adopted by brands and merchants that sell on Amazon and elsewhere across the web.
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Why Alaska Airlines Sees Promise In Google Meridian
There’s no way around using an assortment of measurement methodologies, says Owen Bickford, the paid performance media director at Alaska Airlines. “I don’t think they can work in a vacuum.”
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksRockerbox’s Attribution Journey
Ron Jacobson took the classic programmatic startup route. Which is to say, he pivoted randomly from a software job at a bank (well, the New York Fed), landed at an ad tech company and later founded his own ad tech startup before getting acquired by yet another ad tech company.
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Why Advertisers Can’t Figure Out If They’re Monetizing Illicit Content On YouTube
For at least a year, Adalytics has observed creator accounts on YouTube eluding the platform’s IP and rights monitoring tech to distribute movies, shows and live sports that should be exclusive to streaming or cable subscriptions.
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Agentic Commerce For All
New Generation AI, a startup founded last year, is looking to build agentic AI products for brands and retailers of any size. It’s an exciting time, says Jonathan Arena, one of New Gen’s co-founders and a former product lead at Patreon.
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Crisp Acquires Cantactix, As Ad Tech And Analytics Unite Around Retail Data
Crisp announced its acquisition of Cantactix, an in-store analytics company which helps retailers optimize their shelf space.
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How DoorDash And Symbiosys Plan To Collaborate Post-Acquisition
What’s DoorDash’s post-acquisition plan for the retail media ad tech startup Symbiosys?