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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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 […]
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Comcast’s FreeWheel Hires Utpal Kalita As Blockgraph CTO In Blockchain Data Push
Comcast’s advertising business is gearing up to run campaigns with Blockgraph, a data-sharing product that uses blockchain technology to allow advertisers to target TV audiences using first-party data. Comcast first mentioned its blockchain advertising ambitions in 2017 at Cannes, and since then the initiative has been incubated by Comcast’s FreeWheel ad tech subsidiary. On Thursday, […]
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Datorama Opens App Developer Marketplace For Ad And Measurement Tools
Datorama, the Salesforce marketing analytics platform, launched an app marketplace Thursday where companies can list new automated data products. AT&T’s Xandr ad unit has one app in the marketplace at launch, which pulls data from the AppNexus demand-side platform (DSP) into Datorama, so it can be analyzed alongside other DSP or ad platform campaign data, […]
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Quantcast Is Starting To Make Money Off Its CMP Footprint
Quantcast began monetizing its consent management platform (CMP) business for the first time on Thursday with the launch of Choice Premium, a paid version of the publisher tool. Quantcast Choice was released about a year ago with the introduction of the IAB Europe’s CMP registry and the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), the collaborative industry […]
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Learning Google’s Dizzying Policies: 20 Minutes With Prabhakar Raghavan On His New Job Leading Ads And Commerce
It’s been almost eight months since Prabhakar Raghavan took the reins of Google’s advertising and commerce business, but it isn’t getting any less complicated. “I have to say, it took me several hour-long sessions before I could grasp all of our data policies,” Raghavan quipped during a candid conversation with four reporters at the Google […]
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Ad Sales Prez Rita Ferro Talks Disney’s Digital Evolutions – And Ambitions
Disney has been at the center of some of the most important recent shakeups in digital media. It officially closed its $71.3 billion deal for 21st Century Fox in March. And late last year, moved from Comcast’s FreeWheel ad server to the Google Ad Manager platform, a vendor switch with huge implications as TV networks […]
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Google Revamps Ecommerce Ads Pitch With New Formats And Shopping Hub
Google released a slate of new shopping ad products on Tuesday, upping the ante in commerce marketing as Amazon, Facebook-agram and Adobe ramp up their shopper ad businesses. Google’s new shopping ad formats, unveiled at Google Marketing Live in San Francisco, tie formerly siloed properties within Google, such as YouTube and Maps, into a more […]
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Adobe Launches Commerce Cloud That Connects Ecom Data To Ad Products
Adobe launched a cloud product suite for retail and ecommerce technology services on Monday. The Adobe Commerce Cloud is the fourth Adobe cloud offering, joining the Experience, Advertising and Analytics clouds. The core of the new commerce package is the Magento ecommerce platform Adobe acquired a year ago for $1.68 billion, that’s now been integrated […]
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Telaria’s Mark Zagorski On Earning Impressions And Exclusive Deals In CTV
Telaria has more than tripled its stock price since Mark Zagorski took over as CEO almost two years ago. Telaria’s Q1 revenue increased 42% year-over-year to $13.8 million, according to the company’s quarterly earnings report on Thursday. Recently, the video ad tech company has been riding the tailwinds of connected TV (CTV) and OTT app […]
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The Trade Desk’s Revenue Is Up, And Benefits From General Ad Tech Slide
The Trade Desk captured $121 million in revenue during Q1, up 41% from $85.7 million in the same period last year, the company reported on Thursday. Its profitability in the quarter rose to $10.2 million, from $9.1 million in 2018. It’s been more than two years since The Trade Desk IPO’d, and strong revenue gains […]
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Digital Advertising Eclipses $100 Billion For First Time, Per IAB Report
Digital ads in the United States accounted for more than $107 billion last year, the first year digital advertising eclipsed $100 billion after totaling $88 billion in 2017, according to the IAB’s annual Internet Advertising Revenue Report. The report, which is conducted by PwC, uses Comscore media metrics to measure audience totals and time spent […]
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The Whys And Hows Of Google’s Ad Growth Rate Slowdown
Google surprised investors on its quarterly earnings last week when it reported roughly $1 billion less revenue than expected and a significant deceleration of its advertising growth rate. On the one hand, Google is still immensely profitable and its business is so large that a smaller growth rate is still huge. Google’s raw ad revenue […]
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Is It The End Of An Era For Ad Tech OGs?
Call it the circle of life, or the post-boom days of online advertising or just the end of the ad tech OG. What’s clear, though, is that many pioneers of the first wave of advertising technology companies are getting out of the game. Brian O’Kelley, co-founder and former CEO of AppNexus, holds the patent on […]
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Prog IO: Google’s Brad Bender On Balancing Web Stakeholders, Without Breaking The Web
Sometimes it seems impossible to reconcile the demands of users, publishers and advertisers, the three main stakeholders of the ad-supported internet. “It’s really important that all three of these constituencies can benefit from digital advertising,” said Brad Bender, VP of product management for Google’s buy and sell-side advertising technology. On topics like privacy, web-tracking cookies […]
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Criteo Earnings Remain Flat As Browser Changes Spook Investors
Criteo’s revenues totaled $558 million in Q1 2019, a 1% decline from last year, though net profitability increased 1% to $21 million, the company said in its quarterly earnings on Tuesday. The core retargeting business outperformed forecasts, helping to keep revenue at a relative plateau, but Criteo’s non-retargeting businesses, like in-app advertising and audience onboarding, […]
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Alphabet’s Quarterly Revenue Passes $36 Billion – But Costs Are Mounting
Despite Alphabet bringing in total revenues of $36.3 billion for Q1 – up 17% from last year – investors are skittish. For one, Alphabet’s revenue would have been higher if not for a $1.7 billion fine levied by the European Union last month on Google’s AdSense business. But analysts were more concerned about the slowdown […]
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Why DTC Brands Are Flocking To Television
A spree of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, including Hubble, Bonobos and Rothy’s, have started running TV commercials. And aside from adding demand to the scatter market, those DTC companies are bringing digital-first measurement standards to the new (ahem, old) media channel. AdExchanger spoke with some top DTC brands about why they’re adding television to the media mix, […]
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Amazon Focuses On Ad Platform Tools As Growth Rate Slows To 34%
Amazon reported slower than usual revenue growth in its earnings report, with overall sales of $59.7 billion in Q1 2019, a 17% increase compared to the year before. Amazon’s annual growth rate dropped, but it is more profitable and its business has a higher profit margin than ever. The company’s operating profit reached $4.4 billion […]
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IAB’s Transparency And Consent Framework Update Is In, And Hopefully Google Will Be Too
The IAB Europe and the IAB Tech Lab on Thursday released a second version of the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), which publishers and technology companies use to pass consent data for online advertising while still complying with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The TCF update will be in a public comment period for […]
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Brave Launches Ad And Rewards Platform, Pitting The Browser Against Ad Tech
Brave, a privacy-centric web browser, launched its advertising and user rewards platform on Wednesday. The Brave browser debuted three years ago and now has more than 9 million users. Its co-founder and CEO Brendan Eich created JavaScript and co-founded Mozilla, which operates the Firefox browser. The new Brave ads are more like browser notifications than […]