Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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AT&T And Bayer Bet On Blockchain To Tame Digital Advertising
Major brands like AT&T and Bayer are on a crusade to bring transparency back to the digital media supply chain – and are hoping the blockchain-based solutions they’re testing can be an answer. “Who specifically are those tech providers [in the supply chain] and how much of a fee are they assessing to my working […]
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What’s Old Is New Again As Online Sellers Rediscover SMS Text
Mobile texting never quite made it into the marketer toolkit, but some online sellers are re-examining SMS as a more cost-effective way to engage known customers than advertising. And ecommerce tech vendors are beefing up mobile messaging because the channel now supports data-driven segmentation, like retargeting campaigns. These capabilities are increasingly valuable as frictionless mobile […]
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TripAdvisor Shares Take Off On Revenue Beat, Improved Online Attribution
TripAdvisor said on its quarterly earnings call Thursday that it is part way through a significant reduction of its online marketing and has stabilized its advertiser auction platform after some buyer exits in the second half of last year cratered prices. TripAdvisor is overhauling its advertising investments due to improved data and attribution, CEO Steve […]
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Why Some Data Companies Are Selling Data As A Percent Of Media
Data providers have embraced an alternative way of buying audience segments: selling data as a percentage of media rather than transacting on CPMs. Instead of buying data at a fixed rate per thousand impressions, a percent-of-media model ties the cost of data to the cost of media. An advertiser, for instance, is unlikely to spend […]
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Criteo Revenue And Shares Are Up, But GDPR And ITP Still Loom Large
Criteo stock shot up Wednesday morning after the French advertising technology company reported revenues of $674 million in the final quarter of 2017, a 19% gain from the same period the year before, and a 27% jump in gross profits for the year. The Q4 revenue numbers came in at the top end of Criteo’s […]
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WFA Advertiser Survey Signals Major Focus On GDPR
If 2017 was the year of brand safety and transparency, 2018 is set to be the year GDPR reshapes programmatic marketing. That’s the sentiment of 28 brand marketers and media directors surveyed by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) trade group for its “Future of Programmatic Media” report published Friday. The brands represented collectively spend […]
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How The IAB And Ad Tech Plan To Transmit GDPR Consent In Programmatic
The IAB Tech Lab is tackling the thorny problem of transmitting consent under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. On Friday, the Tech Lab debuted an openRTB feature to convey user consent through the digital supply chain and unveiled plans to launch a GDPR Technical Working Group tasked with helping programmatic advertisers deal with […]
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Comeback Time? Twitter Turns A Profit And Sees Advertiser Gains
A budding sense of optimism around Twitter was substantiated Thursday when the social platform announced its first-ever quarter of profitability and a return to revenue growth. Twitter saw 2% year-over-year revenue growth with a total of $732 million in the final quarter of 2017, after a string of revenue declines last year. Twitter averaged 330 […]
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Investors Perk Up As Acxiom Announces Strategic Review, Potential Asset Sale
Acxiom stock ticked up Tuesday despite missing revenue estimates and lowering revenue guidance. A likely reason: The company announced a strategic review of its Marketing Services business and some of its Audience Solutions assets to consider a potential sale, merger, spin-off or other exit. CEO Scott Howe told investors the plan is to consolidate Acxiom’s […]
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Why Ad Tech And Agencies Are Turning To Employee Data Science Courses
At M&C Saatchi Mobile, a senior media planner who once created up to 25 reports per week coded a solution to generate those reports from Excel with just a click. The move saved the planner about an hour and a half per week, and now the code is scaled for others to use. The planner […]
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Why Criteo Is Battling Fierce Headwinds In 2018
Criteo has always been something of an ad tech enigma. That French retargeting virtuoso, the golden child of Wall St. as the markets soured on advertising technology. But nothing gold can stay. And now Criteo has its work cut out to convince investors that the company can grow in the face of browser anti-tracking updates, namely […]
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Pepsi Paid Top Dollar, And Plans To Win The Big Game This Weekend
Some Super Bowl predictions are easy: The big game will attract the largest US TV audience of the year and drive a single-day bonanza of food and beverage purchases. But for brands like Pepsi, which are placing the biggest marketing bets of the year over Super Bowl weekend, establishing ROI is no sure thing. Brands […]
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For Kiehl’s, More Data and More Business Hasn’t Meant More Advertising
Kiehl’s, a high-end cosmetics brand and the country’s third-oldest retailer, has traditionally prioritized experiential branding over broadcast or online ad reach. While that preference isn’t changing, Kiehl’s is becoming a more digital, data-driven business. The brand started running programmatic campaigns in late 2016, and previously did little to no online media buying, said Julia Mavrodin, […]
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Procter & Gamble Plans To Keep Slashing Marketing Costs
Procter & Gamble isn’t done trimming its agency and advertising investments, even after a year of deep cuts to media and production budgets, according to senior managers during the company’s Q2 earnings report on Tuesday. Digital media and tech vendors have become more transparent since P&G began crusading against online supply chain failures a year […]
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How Marriott’s Loyalty Data Program Is Driving Its Media Ambitions
Many large brands have in-housed advertising technology as part of a data-driven marketing overhaul. But for Marriott, the data-driven plan has meant taking more ownership of media production, including travel news sites and documentary features, as data ties creative content to bottom-line results. Last year, Marriott consolidated data from its Marriott and Ritz-Carlton rewards programs […]
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Industry Preview: As AT&T Fights For Time Warner, Its Ad Platform Is Full Steam Ahead
With Time Warner on board or not, AT&T is pushing forward with its vision for the next potential addressable ad platform giant. CMOs or holding company agencies might pour money into Google and Facebook, but “they’re nervous about the content they’ve produced living in environments they can’t control,” said Brian Lesser, AT&T’s CEO of advertising […]
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Still On The Blocks, But Blockchain Ad Tech Hopes To Race This Year
The rise (and fall, and rise, etc.) of cryptcurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum brought mainstream attention to blockchain technology. And advertisers and online publishers hope blockchain-based ad buys could expose bad actors in digital media. Despite the hype, however, the number of advertising dollars transacted through blockchain technology is near zero, and blockchain ad tech […]
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Corey Ferengul Named CEO Of Magnetic To Develop New Go-To-Market Approach
Ad targeting company Magnetic has a new CEO: ad tech vet Corey Ferengul. He replaces James Green, who served as CEO for the past six years. It’s time for the company to evolve and grow beyond its retargeting roots, said Ferengul, who previously sat on Magnetic’s board and also served as chief exec of programmatic […]
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Phoenix Marketing Acquires Nielsen TV Ad Recall Product
Nielsen’s TV Brand Effect (TVBE) business now belongs to Phoenix Marketing International, a performance measurement and metrics company. Phoenix on Monday acquired the syndicated service, which is used by brands to measure recall of television ads based on Nielsen data. The companies declined to share the price of the deal. Nielsen will continue to operate […]
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BMO's Dan Salmon Reviews Ad Investment Trends For 2018
Dan Salmon will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 17-18, 2018, at the Grand Hyatt New York. As 2018 kicks off, markets are wary of ad-driven stocks – unless your name is Alphabet, Facebook or Amazon. But there remains immense value in companies enabling addressable audiences, according to Dan Salmon, equity research analyst for […]
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Everything Old Is New Again, As MGM Finds Data-Driven Ways To Monetize Its Classics
MGM Networks is expanding to OTT platforms and expects data-driven TV advertising to revitalize the studio’s library of films and TV shows. Last year, MGM Networks launched an OTT app for the Comet sci-fi channel and saw 120,000 downloads despite minimal promotional spend, said senior VP Todd Parkin. The company plans to launch OTT apps […]
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Why L’Oreal Is Giving Media Ownership A Spin
L’Oreal will expand a media ownership strategy it piloted in Mexico to other Spanish-speaking countries to generate first-party cookies from its customer base. The idea is similar to sponsored content, but instead of working with a brand-name media company on a story package, for the past year L’Oreal has developed fiufiu, a kind of pop-up […]
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A Year In Review For The Year Of Amazon
For those whose New Year’s wish was never to see the word “duopoly” again: Take cheer! Soon we may start talking about the “triopoly” instead. Amazon’s $1 billion to $2 billion per year in ad revenue in 2017, according to eMarketer estimates, may be a pittance to the tens of billions earned by Google or […]
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The Top Stories And Trends Of 2017 In Data-Driven Advertising
What interested AdExchanger readers most in 2017? The most popular stories of the year show that header bidding’s evolution remained a hot topic – server-to-server integrations, in-app header bidding and supply-path optimization. But 2017 was also a year of upheaval. Fallout from Apple’s Safari changes and Google’s YouTube changes concerned many readers. And there was […]
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LendingTree Scales Dynamic Creative To Juice Its Display Ad Returns
LendingTree, an online lead-generation exchange for consumer loans, is hoping to prove that more informed creative can be one of the main drivers of real-time advertising performance. The company spent two years evaluating dynamic creative optimization (DCO) technologies and is now scaling out the program under the startup RevJet, said Josh Eldridge, LendingTree’s senior marketing […]
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Google Hopes Industry Ad Standards Will Quash Bad Ads And Blockers
Google had always been eager to kill shoddy ad formats, because doing so would stall ad-blocker growth. At the same time, it didn’t want to be the judge and jury, so it needed a mechanism to do so. Enter the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), a nonprofit founded by the IAB, ANA and 4As to […]
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Google’s Chrome Will Start Removing “Failing” Ads In February
Google will launch the Chrome browser’s built-in ad-blocking service February 15 next year, the company said in a developer page update on Tuesday. The new Chrome ad blocker will be based on standards established by the Coalition for Better Ads (CFBA), and will be the default service for all Chrome browser users. Banned units include […]
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How The Beauty Startup Wunder2 Grew From Facebook To Retail Stores
Since it began delivering makeup product lines in 2015, the London-based beauty startup Wunder2 demonstrates how savvy ecommerce companies can use Facebook targeting and video campaigns to push into retail distribution. Wunder2 follows in the footsteps of Facebook-centric startup brands like the mattress-in-a-box manufacturer Purple, which landed its first retail distribution deal last month, and […]
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Why Kroger Wants To Be A Walled Garden – And Why It’s An Uphill Battle
The revelation that Kroger is developing a data-driven ad platform, Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM), to launch next year underscores how brick-and-mortars are trying to exert control over their data in the same manner as an ecommerce company. Yet the goal of a true brick-and-mortar walled garden is fraught with challenges. For decades, retailers sold anonymized […]
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Ads.txt Study Shows Huge Publisher Losses To Domain Fraud
Ads.txt research released Tuesday shines a new light on the extent of the harm done to major publishers by inventory resellers and lax supply chain standards. A joint study from Google, Amobee and Quantcast that examined Ads.txt data found rampant counterfeit inventory available to DSPs that seemingly came from 16 media companies, including Turner, The […]