Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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CEO George Colony On Forrester’s Acquisition Streak And Plans For Mar Tech
Forrester tried to acquire SiriusDecisions, a B2B market research and analytics firm, five years ago, so closing a $245 million deal for the company last week felt like a natural step. But SiriusDecisions was the third acquisition in the past half-year for Forrester, which historically buys a company every three years or so, said founder […]
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Advertising ID Consortium Enters Next Phase With LiveRamp’s First Bidstream Integration
LiveRamp, dataxu and Index Exchange launched the first commercial proof of concept for the Advertising ID Consortium on Thursday. The product places LiveRamp’s IdentityLink directly in the bidstream, skipping the cookie syncs typically required for a DSP and SSP to match against LiveRamp in a campaign. Additionally, Bill Simmons, dataxu’s co-founder and CTO, is joining […]
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Gap Evolves Its Marketing Strategies With Its New Digital-First Brand Hill City
When Gap Inc. launched the men’s activewear label Hill City in September, it marked its first new brand in a decade, and its first-ever foray into digital-first territory. Hill City has some notable differences compared to other DTC companies – like corporate ownership and a running start with distribution in 50 Athleta stores (Gap’s activewear […]
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How Mobile Commerce Became The Key To Retail Success For Thanksgiving Shopping
Thanksgiving holiday shopping trends have shifted from surprising to predictable. At this point, the big news will be in some hypothetical, future November when ecommerce sales stop growing hand over fist. Ecommerce sales reached $18 billion combined for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday alone cleared about $8 billion, the […]
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What Ticketmaster Is Grateful For This Thanksgiving (Hint: It’s The NFL)
Thanksgiving and watching football on Thanksgiving are American traditions. But this year will be the first celebration of what you might call Ticketmaster’s football Thanks-for-giving-us-your-business day. The ticket-sales company has secured the exclusive ticketing rights for the NFL and transitioned the league to digital-only tickets this year. Now Ticketmaster is spiking the football – which, […]
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Zenith Forecasts Slower Programmatic Media Growth As Data Costs Go Up
Global programmatic advertising will grow by more than $13 billion next year and the year after, but its growth rate has stalled and it’s making slower-than-expected headway in taking share from non-programmatic media, according to Zenith’s 2018 Programmatic Marketing Forecast published Monday. Programmatic display advertising will clear $70.2 billion this year, according to the report, […]
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BlockThrough Buys PageFair To Rework Its Ad Blocker Solutions Technology
The publisher tech startup Blockthrough, which specializes in retrieving revenue lost to ad blocking, acquired its rival and category pioneer PageFair on Thursday. Terms were not disclosed. PageFair was one of the first startups offering technology for publishers to counteract ad blocking, either by circumventing the ad blocker or by creating new direct audience agreements, […]
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Why DTC Brands Avoid Amazon
Direct-to-consumer brands like Mack Weldon, Manscaped and Peloton have expanded beyond their Facebook and Instagram roots – but don’t expect them to start advertising with or selling most of their products on Amazon. Though Amazon seems like a natural expansion for ecommerce startups, reducing the impact of the world’s biggest ecom platform is a strategic […]
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The Trade Desk Grows Hand-Over-Fist In Q3
The Trade Desk reported Q3 revenue of $118.8 million, a 50% year-over-year increase. The company has maintained growth of 50% or more in the past two quarters, matching its growth rates from the same periods last year. With an upward revision to the company’s revenue forecast next quarter, CEO Jeff Green said he expects the […]
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Election 2018: Pollsters Are Redeemed, But Still Overlook Silent Trump Voters
The 2016 election was a disaster for the reputations of political pollsters, many of whom missed badly. With the midterm elections now in the bag, how well did the pre-election surveys match Tuesday’s results? Pretty well, actually. Public polls and data aggregators like FiveThirtyEight were, broadly speaking, closer to the mark in 2018 than they […]
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How CEO Micky Onvural Sees Retail And Reach Reshaping Bonobos' Marketing
The online clothing retailer Bonobos is at the center of upheaval in US retail and ecommerce. The company was acquired by Walmart last year for $310 million and has opened 58 brick-and-mortar stores in the past seven years. Bonobos also exemplified the direct-to-consumer category in September when former CMO Micky Onvural was promoted to CEO. […]
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Liberal Ad Tech Agonizes Over The Question: Did Democrats Miss On Digital Media Again?
With the midterm elections less than 24 hours away, some of the Democratic Party’s top digital advertising evangelists are worried that liberal candidates have squandered opportunities by siloing digital media and failing to adequately spend online. Conservative groups account for seven of the ten highest-spending political advertisers on Google and Facebook, according to data collected […]
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Criteo Revenue Drops As It Invests In Business Transformation
Criteo brought in $529 million in the past quarter, a 6% drop from the same period last year, the company disclosed in its Q3 earnings report Wednesday. The revenue drop is in line with Criteo’s previous forecast as it transitions from its traditional retargeting business to becoming a self-serve mobile platform. “We’ve been upfront about […]
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Advertiser Perceptions: Independent DSPs Find Pockets Of Growth Despite Google’s Dominance
Google and Amazon still dominate the demand-side platform category, but next-tier players have opportunities to win market share and for the first time there are signs that Google’s iron grip may be softening, according to the half-yearly Advertiser Perceptions DSP Wave released Wednesday. The report is based on surveys of almost 500 brand and agency […]
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LiveRamp Embraces Standalone Status And Lays Out Its Road To A Billion In Revenue
LiveRamp began trading as $RAMP on the New York Stock Exchange on Monday and hosted investors and analysts when the company reintroduced itself to the market following the sale of Acxiom Marketing Solutions to IPG for $2.3 billion in July. LiveRamp is embracing its position as a subscription-based middleware technology, a category that comes with […]
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Amazon Tests Search-Based Retargeting, The First Time Its Search Data Leaves Its Walls
Amazon is testing a program that lets advertisers use search queries to retarget across the web, according to agency executives briefed about the pilot program. This capability is only available through Amazon’s DSP and it is the first time that Amazon search data is being used off of Amazon’s owned and operated platform. While Amazon […]
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Snapchat Likes Its Programmatic Revenue In Q3, But Daily Users Dwindle
Snapchat saw promising gains for its advertising platform in earnings reported Thursday. The company reported a record-high $298 million in revenue, with 43% year-over-year growth, and quarterly jumps in average revenue per user (ARPU) from $2.21 to $2.62 in North America and $0.66 to $0.85 in Europe. But Snapchat is still bleeding daily active users […]
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Why Liberals Are Backing (And Banking On) Beto O’Rourke’s Senate Campaign
Online spending records have shattered across the country during this year’s midterm election cycle, but no campaign has brought more attention to digital media than that of Democrat Beto O’Rourke, a Texas congressman running for Republican Ted Cruz’s Senate seat. No candidate this year has raised more money online or spent more on Google, Facebook […]
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Oath Revenue Declines, But Verizon Isn’t Sweating The Ad Slowdown
Verizon’s Oath content and advertising subsidiary brought in $1.8 billion in the past quarter, down 6.9% from the same period last year, Verizon said in its earnings report Tuesday. Verizon attributed the downturn to declining desktop and search advertising. CEO Hans Vestberg said the Oath business should remain flat for the short term and that […]
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Scripps Will Acquire Streaming Audio Tech Company Triton For $150 Million
E.W. Scripps said Wednesday it will buy audio advertising and measurement company Triton for $150 million. Scripps had previously purchased on-demand audio service Stitcher and podcasting ad net Midroll, but Triton will be its first subscription software business and first advertising measurement offering. “We’re always looking for good opportunities, particularly if they diversify our revenue […]
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How Marketo Added $3 Billion In Two Years, And Why PE Thinks There’s More To Come
When Adobe acquired the B2B marketing company Marketo for $4.8 billion last week, investors pressed CEO Shantanu Narayen to explain the gulf between Adobe’s price tag and Wall Street’s valuation of Marketo two years ago, when Vista Equity Partners snapped it off the stock market for $1.8 billion. Private equity investors have shown they have […]
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Dish Network’s Brad Stamulis On Viewability And Attribution, Flip Sides Of The Same Coin
Brad Stamulis will be speaking about attribution at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York conference on Oct. 15-16. The ad industry has been slow to adopt attribution modeling beyond cookies and last-touch credit for direct response campaigns. Many marketers attribute the slow pace of innovation in advanced attribution to cost or complexity. But another reason it hasn’t […]
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The Trade Desk Is Flying High. Can It Last?
When The Trade Desk IPO’d in September 2016, it nearly doubled its own value projection and quickly became a $1 billion company. Fast-forward two years and the company’s market cap sits at around $6 billion. The question for many analysts and ad tech observers is: How long can this ride last? Investors have pumped a […]
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Beachfront Appoints Chris Maccaro As CEO To Ride The Video Ad Wave
Marketers want quality video inventory and publishers and broadcasters are producing more video, but the digital media ecosystem remains disconnected. The chance to secure a position in online video advertising as those supply and demand forces click into place lured Chris Maccaro from Oath, where he was head of emerging markets, to the CEO job […]
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Snapchat Expands Ecommerce Tools As It Courts Performance Marketers
Snapchat introduced ecommerce advertising capabilities on Thursday, including a product catalog ad format called Collection Ads, a performance marketing agency partner program and more than 40 shopping partners, including eBay and Wish. “This is the first time we’re addressing the needs of a specific vertical, as opposed to previously building general products for advertisers,” said […]
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Oracle Data Cloud's Plan To Take Over Digital Media Without Touching Media
Since Oracle Data Cloud’s creation four years ago, following the acquisitions of data sellers Datalogix and BlueKai, it has taken a central role in powering Oracle’s core products. Oracle Data Cloud further enhanced its ability to measure the digital media supply chain with its $850 million acquisition of Moat and the $400 million acquisition of […]
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Salesforce Gets Into The ID Graph Game With Launch Of Customer 360
Salesforce on Tuesday introduced Salesforce Customer 360, a unified customer ID that connects profile data across its Sales, Services, Commerce and Marketing cloud product suites. “There are so many ways for a person to engage with a brand nowadays and a certain level of control has been lost behind these layers of technology and media,” […]
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AppNexus Has Quit The Industry’s Ad ID Consortium. Is This The End?
AppNexus’s new telco owner, AT&T, has withdrawn it from the Advertising ID Consortium, a shared industry cookie ID it co-founded last year, along with other independent ad tech platforms. Adweek first reported the move on Thursday. Does the withdrawal spell curtains for the independent identity graph before it really got off the ground? The consortium […]
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IZOD’s Latest Campaign Scores With In-House Marketing
An ad campaign launched this month by IZOD, the men’s fashion company, encapsulates the advantages of in-housing marketing, from creative strategy and production through post-campaign attribution. The company doesn’t work with outside agencies, but has an agency model that serves constituents within the company instead of various brand customers, said Mike Kelly, chief marketing officer […]
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Adobe Will Buy Marketo For $4.75 Billion
Adobe said Thursday it has agreed to acquire the B2B marketing platform Marketo for $4.75 billion. It’s the biggest deal in Adobe’s history. And the cloud technology giant may be shelling out so much because Marketo’s B2B category strength could help as Adobe moves into media buying and ecommerce, à la TubeMogul and Magento, where […]