Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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. […]
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Nielsen’s Q2 Audience Benchmark Shows How Connected Devices Are Reshaping Media
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The old adage applies to the new media landscape, where sweeping technology changes have scattered US audiences across new devices but has also greatly increased the amount of content consumed per year. The average American adult watches 5 hours and 24 minutes per day of […]
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How Programmatic Is Reshaping J&J’s Shopper Marketing – Even For Non-Ecom Brands
Data and analytics are breaking down the walls between Johnson & Johnson’s shopper marketing and national marketing plans. Danielle Price manages shopper marketing and consumer promotions for J&J’s Aveeno brand after working as a J&J shopper marketing rep to Walmart. Her new job spans shopper marketing and national promotions, which used to be two roles, […]
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Agencies Laud Unilever's Retiring CMO Keith Weed
Keith Weed announced Thursday that he will step down from his role as Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer in April. Weed has worked for Unilever for more than 35 years, the last eight as Unilever’s top marketer. His departure, which he announced in a tweet, has been planned for more than a year. It […]
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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 […]