Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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FreeWheel Making Moves On The Buy Side With First Upfront Event
FreeWheel, the Comcast-owned video ad tech company, hosted its first television upfront on Wednesday and is mounting a campaign to expand its buy-side business. The marketer outreach centers on new attribution features and the launch of FreeWheel Media, which formalizes its buy-side accounts and ad-serving business into a cohesive offering, CRO Brian Wallach told AdExchanger. […]
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Everything You Need To Know About The Bidstream
The phrase “bidstream data” is popping up more and more, but few understand what the bidstream is and what data is available. In the world of real-time ad auctions, bidstream data comes from a publisher or app and includes basic facts about the ad unit, like publisher and URL, device type, IP address and ad […]
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Sizmek Could Be Forced Into Sale After 2018 Revenue Miss And Ad Server Losses
Sizmek needs another investment round after facing setbacks and revenue shortfalls in 2018, and it won’t find new funding with Vector Capital, the firm that backed the acquisitions and integration of Sizmek and Rocket Fuel. Sizmek is working with Cerberus Capital Management, the PE firm that financed the debt on Vector’s deal for Rocket Fuel […]
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How The Trade Desk Has Evolved For The Next Stage Of DSP Growth
The Trade Desk shocked many observers last May when shares jumped from around $50 to $90, and then again in August when the stock leapt to about $130. Now shares are trading at almost $200. But what’s behind The Trade Desk’s monumental growth in the past year? The company benefits from a smaller field of […]
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Telaria Bounces Back On Strength Of CTV Media Players
The programmatic video ad tech provider Telaria earned $55.2 million in 2018, up 26% from the year before, with total profits up 20% to $16.8 million, the company disclosed in its earnings report on Tuesday. Telaria shares were up more than a third during the day and have now recovered from the company’s earnings report […]
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Amazon Goes Big On Conquesting Ads, Despite The Blowback
Amazon is ratcheting up conquesting campaigns, both as an ad platform and as a private-label brand operator. Conquesting is when a brand tries to directly peel off a competitor’s customers or audience. It was a limited strategy in the old world of media and shopping, where there wasn’t much data to identify a rival’s loyal […]
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YouTube’s Latest Brand Safety Scare Is Very Different From 2017
Marketers are reacting differently to YouTube’s latest brand safety flare-up compared to 2017, when scores of global brands suspended YouTube campaigns over ads monetizing violent or offensive videos. There’s certainly some déjà vu, with Disney, Nestlé’s and McDonald’s halting YouTube spending after YouTube creator Matt Watson showed them advertising on a video that had a […]
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The Trade Desk Train Is Still Picking Up Speed With 55% Revenue Growth
The Trade Desk’s growth streak shows no sign of diminishing, with revenue of $477 million in 2018, a 55% increase from the year before, according to the company’s earnings report on Thursday. Shares of The Trade Desk were up more than 10% in after-hours trading. The company raised eyebrows last year when its stock went […]
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Oracle Data Cloud Companies Expose ‘DrainerBot’ App Fraud Scheme
Oracle has uncovered an ad fraud operation it calls “DrainerBot,” which siphoned off ad dollars and monthly data packages. Oracle’s internet infrastructure business Dyn originally discovered the operation after it picked up suspicious activity among some mobile apps using an SDK from Tapcore, a Dutch mobile monetization company. The apps obscured web data with proxy […]
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US Digital Marketing Spend Beats Traditional For The First Time
US digital ad spend in 2019 will surpass all traditional advertising for the first time, growing to $129.3 billion this year, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast. Digital advertising is being driven by mobile, which is now more than two-thirds of the digital category, and by TV dollars moving to streaming and online video. Oh, and […]
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OPINION: On TV & VideoBranded Entertainment Network Sees Growth In Hollywood Data Biz
Branded Entertainment Network (BEN), an LA-based agency that specializes in product placement and influencer marketing, wants to bring a more data-driven approach to Hollywood brand marketing. Last March the company promoted Ricky Ray Butler to CEO, three years after adding Butler with the acquisition of Plaid Social Labs, the social marketing tech company he founded. […]
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Criteo Starts To Stabilize As Retargeting Losses Continue
Criteo brought in $670 million in Q4 2018, beating expectations but still 1% below its revenue from the year before, the French ad tech leader reported Tuesday. Criteo’s earnings for the year were flat at about $2.3 billion. But CFO Benoît Fouilland said the stability is a positive sign, considering Criteo was coming out of […]
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Highland Math Forms First Data Co-op Of Data Sellers
Data transparency is all the rage in digital advertising, but data companies themselves still exist in a world of black boxes and inscrutable spreadsheets. Highland Math was founded last year to help address the issue, by creating a consortium of data providers that pool their own returns to create a market research data set. The […]
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LiveRamp Adds Connected TV IDs To IdentityLink
LiveRamp has added connected TV IDs to IdentityLink, its cross-device identity graph, the company said during its Monday Q4 2018 earnings report. Connected TV IDs are tied to a home IP address, and are used to distinguish households by companies that serve ads over smart TVs or OTT services, including some smart TV manufacturers, multichannel […]
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The Booming Business For Amazon-Only Ad Partners
As marketers spend more with Amazon, they’re spawning a cottage industry of Amazon-focused ad tech vendors and service partners. Brands need specialists to guide them across Amazon’s sprawling marketing empire – a brand may deal separately with Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), Amazon’s Alexa voice group, Amazon Fresh groceries, Twitch and the company’s packaging and shipment […]
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Google’s GDPR Policies Throw Digital Media Into Disarray
Since GDPR came into effect last year, Google has been at the center of two connected issues around resolving identity in digital marketing. First, it planned to remove the DoubleClick ID (now the Google ID) from its log files, preventing ad tech and analytics companies from using the ID to track campaigns across the web. […]
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Google’s Expenses Increase As It Makes Its Way Into TV
Google still brings in the big bucks, but its costs are skyrocketing as well as the digital media giant pushes its way into TV advertising. First, the basics. Alphabet brought in $39.3 billion in Q4 2018, up 23% from the same period the year before, the company disclosed in its quarterly earnings report on Monday. […]
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Amazon Hopes To Free Up More Ad Inventory – Just Not On Prime
Amazon’s “Other” category, its miscellaneous revenue segment that consists primarily of advertising, made $3.4 billion in Q4 2018, almost doubling from Q4 2017. The “Other” category also grew by about $900 million from the prior quarter, for the first time outpacing the growth of Amazon Web Services, the cloud infrastructure business, which added $700 million, […]
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Why British Gas Ditched Google’s Ad Server
Google has maintained its dominant share of the ad server market because switching ad servers is a hellacious process that requires a hard reset on media plans, analytics, creative and billing. But Google’s announcement last May that it would remove the Google ID from its ad-server log files, thus prohibiting marketers from tracking or measuring […]
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The FTC Rethinks Its Role In The New Data Economy
The ad tech industry might soon be facing a more punitive FTC. While the consumer privacy and protections agency traditionally came down on blatantly fraudulent advertising, like rebilling scams, or improperly targeting children, the influx of data-driven technology has required the FTC to reevaluate its agenda. With consumer privacy protections becoming a more pressing issue, […]
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Can Ad Tech ID-Sharing Succeed If It’s For Attribution, Not For Targeting?
A slew of consortiums, collaborations and integrations have emerged to fill the need for a universal advertising ID, which would help publishers and ad tech companies level the playing field with Google, Facebook, Amazon and other platforms with vast logged-in user data. But those vendor-focused initiatives struggled to gain broad adoption and overcome competitive issues […]
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Datorama Unveils New Campaign And Analytics Tools For Salesforce Cloud
Salesforce expanded integrations between its marketing cloud platform and Datorama, the customer data platform it acquired for $800 million last year, the company announced Wednesday at AdExchanger’s Industry Preview in New York City. The new features allow Datorama customers to centralize marketing data from email and social media campaigns for analytics or ad campaign management. […]
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Claritas Buys AcquireWeb With Aspirations To Be The Next Consumer Identity Graph
Claritas acquired the CRM and identity company AcquireWeb on Tuesday, the third in a yearlong buying spree as Claritas revamps its traditional audience segment business for real-time, data-driven media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Claritas will gain 20-30 AcquireWeb employees. In the past year Claritas has also added Geoscape, a multicultural audience […]
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Civis Launches Creative Focus As Brands Bring Data To Pre-Campaign Strategy
The analytics startup Civis was founded in 2013 with roots in political data and targeting and has since transitioned to commercial business, where advertisers are less familiar with testing messages to sway public opinion. Most big brands rely on panels or focus groups, which “have a lot of contamination” because more people self-select into groups […]
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Nielsen Releases 'Bird Box' Ratings As SVOD Measurement Comes Into Focus
Nielsen went public with ratings for the Netflix hit film “Bird Box” on Tuesday, estimating that the blockbuster (so to speak) attracted 26 million US viewers in its first week. But wait, didn’t Netflix say 45 million accounts watched “Bird Box” in the first seven days? Netflix rarely discloses specific viewership numbers for any content, […]
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As Targeting Becomes Old Hat, Ad Tech Turns To Creative
Marketing and ad tech companies are becoming more involved in creative planning and production. Ad tech vendors compete to out-optimize campaigns by even a fraction of a percent, said McKinsey partner Ed See, a leader in the consultancy’s marketing practice. “But in the past few years, the power of targeting has mostly run its course,” […]
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Pivotal Forecasts Amazon Ad Revenue To Reach $38 Billion
Pivotal Research forecast Amazon’s advertising revenues will reach $38 billion by 2023, growing faster than any other Amazon business in that time. The investment research firm also initiated coverage of the ecommerce company on Monday. Pivotal’s coverage of Amazon was spurred this summer at Cannes and in conversations with marketers about the looming presence of […]
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Open Online IDs Compete To Be Ad Tech Standards
The past two years have seen a rush of consortiums, coalitions and ad tech products that all hope to standardize online IDs to improve match rates. But industry leaders, for-profit startup and nonprofit initiatives can have very different ideas on how to solve that problem. “The question is which one of these models will gain […]
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The Top Data-Driven Advertising Stories And Trends Of 2018
2018 was a momentous year for the world of data and advertising. The implementation of GDPR created vast ripples that have obscured digital audiences and created new demand for addressable media. And even as ad tech companies embrace higher levels of transparency, every layer peeled reveals more auction tricks and data dealings, like bid caching […]
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Sovrn’s Acquisition Of VigLink Shows A Potential Non-Ad Tech Future For SSPs
Sovrn’s acquisition of VigLink last week will make 2019 Sovrn’s first year when subscription software services outearn its traditional advertising exchange. Sovrn began in 2014 as an SSP offering scale and analytics on its aggregated publishing data, growing to be one of the largest ad networks with tens of thousands of blogs and publisher clients. […]