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 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 […]
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Trivago Takes A Vacation From Manual Data Input With Datorama
Brands that run advanced analytics in-house know they aren’t just owning campaign measurement – they’ll have to mine data from scores, if not hundreds, of vendors, publishers and partners. Trivago’s marketing team was bogged down managing the sheer number of API plugins and rationalizing data from disparate sources. Across the advertising and analytics group, 40 […]
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Who Is Guru Gowrappan? New Oath CEO Described As Strong Operator, “Thinking Leader”
Oath COO Guru Gowrappan will take the reins of Verizon’s media and advertising subsidiary following the departure of Tim Armstrong, the former AOL CEO who has overseen the telco’s consolidation of AOL and Yahoo into a single platform, at the end of the year. Verizon hired Gowrappan earlier this year from Alibaba, where he had […]
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Will Ad Tech M&A Derail The Advertising ID Consortium?
Development of the Advertising ID Consortium, a shared cookie-based ID service for programmatic companies, has stalled as two of the key backers, AppNexus and LiveRamp, undertake protracted M&A processes. The consortium is still moving forward, according to sources with knowledge of the nonprofit group’s product development, but the already complicated politics of ‘co-opetition’ are exacerbated […]
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AdBlock Plus Parent Eyeo Ventures Into Programmatic
The German software company eyeo GmbH, which owns Adblock Plus (ABP) and created the Acceptable Ads whitelisting program, will launch its first programmatic technology for reaching ad-blocking audiences on Wednesday. The Acceptable Ads Exchange (AAX) has been in in alpha testing since February with three DSPs – one in the US and two in Europe […]
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Is Verizon Still Interested In Addressable Advertising?
The Wall Street Journal’s revelation Friday that Tim Armstrong, leader of Verizon’s Oath media and advertising group, is in talks to depart the company is in stark contrast with the elevation of media and advertising at its biggest competitor AT&T. When Verizon first assembled Oath, many industry insiders wondered if it would create a new […]
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Why Google And The IAB Europe Haven't Been Able To Resolve Online Consent
The advertising technology ecosystem has been waiting for Google to implement the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF), a protocol for collecting consent and conveying it to intermediaries for data-driven advertising. Google and IAB Europe have been negotiating for almost three months about how to reconcile their technology and interpretations of consent for GDPR, […]
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Can Criteo CEO JB Rudelle Adapt To The Changing Media Environment?
With the rapid pace of change in the advertising technology industry, a couple of years can seem like a generation of change. Which is why it was a surprise to see JB Rudelle, Criteo’s founder and CEO until 2016, return as chief executive in April, retaking the reins a month before the implementation of GDPR. […]
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Google Misses Self-Imposed Deadline To Implement IAB Consent Framework
When GDPR took effect in May, Google told publishers and ad tech vendors it expected to implement the IAB Europe Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) by August. But Google’s consent management solution, Funding Choices, is still not an IAB-registered consent management platform (CMP) and isn’t interoperable with many IAB members. And no new timeline has […]
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Dun & Bradstreet’s Plan To Turn Credit Reporting Into Data-Driven Media
Dun & Bradstreet has come a long since it developed one of the first credit reporting systems in the mid-19th century; And has even come a long way in the past half-decade, when it shifted to data-driven online media. And somebody’s buying what D&B’s selling. The company was acquired earlier this month for $5.38 billion […]
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As Google Restricts Its Ad ID, Advertisers Debate Whether To Use Ads Data Hub
Major brands and global holding companies are preparing for a world without the Google ad ID. A month before GDPR, Google announced that in Europe it would no longer distribute the Google ID, an identifier attached to its ad server log files used to measure campaigns across the web. Any measurement of Google audiences in […]
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How Just For Men Uses Connected TVs Without CTV Inventory
Television advertising is turning gray, but TV data is here to brush in the color. At least that’s the take from Combe, the grooming and hair care product company that runs the Just for Men hair coloring brand. In the past couple of years, Just for Men’s media mix shifted from primarily TV to a […]
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PebblePost Raises $25 Million To Push Direct Mail Further Into Programmatic
PebblePost, a startup pioneering programmatic direct mail, said Tuesday it had secured a $25 million Series C funding round to integrate with the existing programmatic ecosystem. The new investment was led by Advance Venture Partners and brings PebblePost’s total funding to almost $50 million. PebblePost works by retargeting online browsers with direct mail offers, so […]
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Cardlytics Says It Hopes To Expand Beyond Bank-Owned Media
The payments data company Cardlytics, which went public in February, said in its earnings call Wednesday that it hopes to expand its advertising program and the marketing applications of its consumer spending data. Cardlytics had $35.6 million in revenue during the second quarter, up from $32.8 million during the same period last year. Though the […]
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The Trade Desk Surges On Record Revenue – With No Sign of GDPR Slowdown
The Trade Desk recorded revenue of $112.3 million in Q2 2018, a 54% increase from the same period last year, according to the company’s earnings report released Thursday. That growth rate is identical to 2017’s annual growth rate, and the company’s retention rate topped 95% for the 18th consecutive quarter. On the company’s earnings call, […]
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Snap’s Q2 Revenue Growth Is Strong, But User Growth Still Lags
Snap’s revenue grew 44% year over year to $262 million in the second quarter. Its average revenue per user – a critical metric where Snapchat lags behind Facebook and Instagram – increased 34% to $1.40 in Q2. Snapchat’s transition to self-serve programmatic has allowed the company to scale its ad business in ways that weren’t […]
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What’s The Latest For Blockchain In Ad Tech?
Blockchain advertising technology has been surfing a hype cycle that’s brought blockchain and cryptocurrencies to mainstream attention. But are blockchain companies ready for the spotlight? And what work needs to be done before marketers or publishers can begin buying and selling media on blockchain-based platforms? “It reminds me of early days of programmatic when different […]
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Criteo’s Attempts To Broaden Its Portfolio Stymie Growth For Now
Criteo has lowered its full-year revenue guidance as it seeks to evolve its pricing model, the company said during its Q2 earnings call Wednesday. Other headwinds, like mobile privacy policies and GDPR regulations, did affect Criteo’s revenues as dramatically. The company initially anticipated growth between 3% to 8% and now expects growth to be flat. […]
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P&G Puts Working Media Back To Work
Procter & Gamble’s overall advertising budget is still decreasing as the company pulls back on agency fees and services, but the world’s biggest ad spender has begun to return spend to working media, CEO David Taylor told investors during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. P&G has spent more than a year pushing new digital […]
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Advertising Helps Push Amazon’s Profit To $2.5 Billion
Amazon’s ad business continued to throttle up in the second quarter. The ecommerce giant’s “other” revenue category, where it houses advertising sales and services such as marketing measurement, cleared almost $2.2 billion, more than double the $945 million earned during the same period last year, according to the company’s earnings report, released Thursday. Amazon’s gross […]
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Google Strengthens Ads.txt Enforcement
Google will make Ads.txt-authorized-only buying the default setting for its Display & Video 360 (formerly DoubleClick Bid Manager) platform by the end of the year, the company said Thursday. A month ago, Google gave clients the option of only buying ads with approved Ads.txt files, but Display & Video 360’s default buying option still included […]
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Facebook Political Controversies Prove Both Intractable And Manageable
It is “inevitable” that nation-states will try to leverage Facebook and its ad platform to influence elections and political sentiment again as they did during the 2016 presidential election, said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s director of cybersecurity policy. Yet, despite the persistence of false news and misinformation on the platform and likely efforts by bad actors […]
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Alphabet Shrugs Off Fines And GDPR Concerns With Strong Revenue Growth
Alphabet’s second quarter revenue hit $32.7 billion, a 26% jump from the same period last year, according to its earnings report on Monday. The advertising platform is “firing all cylinders,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told investors, with ad revenue reaching $28.1 billion in Q2 2018, compared to $22.7 billion in Q2 2017. This is the […]