Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Criteo Sees New Products And Growth In Data Cooperatives
Criteo on Friday released a suite of products, including audience matching and customer prospecting, as well as a new policy beginning in the fourth quarter to give buyers and DSPs impression-level transparency into every unit of inventory. At the heart of Criteo’s string of product releases this year is a newfound willingness among retailers and […]
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Amazon Benefits As CPG Advertisers Trim Digital Dollars
Amazon is winning a growing share of CPG media dollars, and its September announcement that it would open an office in New York City to house a major expansion of its advertising platform business means the competition will only heat up. It comes as CPG brands pulling back on digital media undercut global agencies, marketing […]
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Is Mobile Data The Key To A New Generation Of Sports Fan?
When fans visit the newly built Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, they immediately face an entranceway deliberately stacked with visuals: a giant falcon statue, a halo-shaped video scoreboard and a view of the city skyline. The first thing many do is take a photo and blast it across social media. And as they do, stadium staff […]
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Is Reliance On LiveRamp Scaring Ad Tech Vendors Out Of The Cross-Device Consortium?
Remember that consortium led by LiveRamp, MediaMath and AppNexus to develop a cookie-based identifier that could be used consistently across the open exchange? While live tests are still set for October, ad tech vendors are hesitant to buy in due to LiveRamp’s exclusive role as a cross-device option. MediaMath is already out, said John Slocum, […]
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Ad Trade Groups Sound The Alarm As Apple Closes The First-Party Cookie Jar
Six ad industry trade groups have called for Apple to rethink an upcoming change to Safari that will unilaterally block some first-party cookies. Apple’s Safari browser started blocking third-party cookies by default earlier this summer with the release of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a machine learning-based feature that discourages cross-site user tracking. But an extension […]
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Sizmek Dumps Rocket Fuel Brand, Names Mark Grether CEO
As it finalized its $145 million acquisition of Rocket Fuel on Wednesday, Sizmek named Mark Grether to take over as CEO. Simultaneously, the company said it would sunset the Rocket Fuel brand and integrate its DSP and DMP assets into a single demand-side stack under the Sizmek name. A co-founder and former COO of WPP […]
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Facebook Avoids A Wash As CPGs Scour The Digital Supply Chain
Consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are threatening steep investment pullbacks if higher standards aren’t met on marketing measurement and transparency. And those Fortune 500 CPGs, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mondelez, Nestlé and Kraft, seem to be holding to their lines in the sand. In the past few weeks, holding companies like IPG, WPP and […]
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Why Data-Driven Retailers Are Learning To Love Direct Mail
As retailers pump more data into traditional marketing channels, they’re uncovering more about how their online and offline marketing interacts. The luggage manufacturer and retailer Tumi last year started working with PebblePost, a startup that connects website cookies to home addresses to automate retargeting via direct mail, and found 96% of the sales driven by […]
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How M&A Impacts The Remaining DSPs
For the independent demand-side platform (DSP) market, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. On the one hand, it’s unlikely any new scaled DSPs will enter the market. The costs to build a competitive platform – nine digits off the bat and another eight digits per year in operational costs […]
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Five Early-Stage Ad Tech Startups That Aren’t Focused On Ad Tech
Ad tech isn’t the investment free-for-all it used to be, but that doesn’t mean the category is dead. True, some types of ad tech have lost their luster. In April, the ad tech investment firm Luma Partners, for the first time since it started doing Lumascapes five years ago, registered fewer new DSPs, SSPs and […]
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Why The Sacramento Kings View Their Stadium As A Digital Platform
The NBA’s Sacramento Kings are entering the second season in the Golden 1 Center, the centerpiece of the team’s new data-driven fan experience. “We tend to think of the stadium as a platform,” said Ryan Montoya, CTO of the Kings organization. “Everything plugs into an operating system, and the data can be shared throughout the […]
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The Trade Desk Closes First Year Of Earnings, As Investors Scrutinize DSP Landscape
The Trade Desk reported Q2 revenue of $72.8 million, a 54% year-over-year increase from the same period last year, and upped its full-year revenue expectations to at least $303 million. In The Trade Desk’s Q1 earnings report, it raised 2017 revenue guidance from $270 million to $291 million. The continued growth was driven by mobile […]
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Why Some Brands Love Voice-Activated Devices Despite Lagging ROI
Brand marketers tend to trail consumer technology habits like an aircraft carrier tracking a fleet of speedboats. And the same dynamic is playing out now with voice-activated search and device use, which has already passed from early adopter stages to an early market majority, according to Adobe mobile VP Matt Asay. Google last year reported […]
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CPG Ad Cuts Raise Tough Questions For Digital Media
The largest advertisers in the world are still dead set on cutting advertising costs and reducing agency fees. On earnings call after earnings call in the past week, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies sent a clear message to the ad industry: The belt is tightening. On Thursday, Procter & Gamble CEO Jon Moeller told investors […]
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Ad Blocking’s Old Guard Remains Strong, But Faces Growing Competition
Ad blocking is generally associated with early browser extensions like AdBlock and eyeo’s Adblock Plus (ABP), which both make their money through the Acceptable Ads whitelisting platform designed by ABP to monetize ad-block users. But the consumer market for ad blocking has branched into apps, mobile browsers and antivirus software all peddling ad blocking wrapped […]
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Alphabet Running At Full Steam Despite Heavy EU Fine
Alphabet continued its hot growth streak in the second quarter of 2017 with more than $26 billion in total revenue, up from $21.5 billion during the same period last year. The ad giant saw its operating income decrease from about $6 billion in Q2 2016 to $4.1 billion a year later due to a $2.7 […]
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Facebook Wants To Prove Its Value In Mixed Media Campaign
Facebook ads are effective within Facebook, but how good are they within a mixed-media campaign, or when assessed over the entire customer journey? That’s the fundamental paradox of the walled garden: Marketers get great data inside of it, but hardly any outside. But Facebook is trying to shed its reputation for impenetrability. The company has […]
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Zeta Global Buys Boomtrain, Adding Machine Learning Mojo
Zeta Global, a provider of cloud-based CRM and email marketing services, has acquired Boomtrain, a machine-learning marketing technology startup that works primarily with retailers and media companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Boomtrain previously raised almost $15 million, and headcount was down 8% in the first six months of 2017, according to LinkedIn […]
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Android And iOS Updates Pump The Brakes On Location Data
Location policy changes for Apple’s iOS 11 update coming in September and Android O, which is still in developer preview, will alter the way consumers dole out location data and have ripple effects for mobile marketing. The most consequential new policy will be on iPhones and iPads, where a blue bar at the top of […]
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Segment To Mount A Go-To-Market Offensive With $64 Million Round
The mobile data platform Segment on Thursday announced a $64 million Series C round led by the Y Combinator Continuity Fund, an investment arm dedicated to the incubator’s alumni, and GV, Google’s venture capital group. The investment brings Segment’s overall funding to $109 million. Its previous investors supported this round as well. The money will […]
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Why Brands Want Lifetime Value In Real-Time Bidding
Some advertisers are shifting from traditional CPM buying to new tactics, often dubbed dynamic CPMs or dCPMs, which connect digital media dollars to lifetime value (LTV) metrics. While most brands still make online ad buys based on cookies and bidstream data evaluated in milliseconds, publishers are starting to accommodate forward-thinking advertisers. For instance, Angie’s List […]
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The Marketer’s Guide To Blockchain
Blockchain, an unmodifiable and unbreachable digital ledger, was conceived 10 years ago to support the cryptocurrency bitcoin. But it has since seeped into new categories, jumping from finance to health care and, more recently, digital advertising. It’s doing so with the backing of big companies like IBM and Comcast, as well as smaller startups like […]
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Shopper Marketing Is Moving Online As Brands Open Data To Stores
Ad tech vendors are clicking “add to cart” on first-party retailer data. As brands and retailers grow more comfortable sharing first-party data, shopper marketing budgets – traditionally spent on last-leg marketing efforts like high-performing shelf space, in-store signage, coupon circulars and co-marketing (“Find us at your nearest…”) – are moving online. “Merchants are talking to me […]
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Online Advertising Puts Another Link In The Blockchain
The drumbeat of blockchain industry news continues this week with the launch of AdLedger Consortium, a blockchain-enabled online advertising group backed by MadHive, a blockchain ad tech startup, IBM, Integral Ad Science and Tegna’s OTT ad subsidiary Premion. As with other initiatives, like Comcast’s fledgling Blockchain Insights Platform, the AdLedger Consortium is still in the […]
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Adobe Doubles Down On Academia To Get Smart About AI And Algos
Adobe is looking to get schooled on AI and data science. While many technology giants foster relationships with academics by offering them lucrative part-time consultancy positions. Adobe is pursuing a different tack: dishing out $50,000 no-strings-attached grants to professors and doctoral students working on projects of joint interest. “What academia provides is more the advanced […]
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Major Amazon And Wal-Mart Acquisitions Could Mark A Retail Turning Point
The convergence of retail and ecommerce accelerated with a blockbuster Friday when it was announced that Amazon would buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and Wal-Mart is snapping up ecommerce men’s clothing company Bonobos for $310 million. The market response to the deals was clear, particularly to Amazon’s 11-digit investment in a brick-and-mortar footprint. The […]
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Sharethrough Bids Farewell To Top Execs Amid Shift To Programmatic
The native advertising technology platform Sharethrough parted ways with company president Patrick Keane and CRO Mike Gaffney last week as it focuses on its programmatic exchange. Christopher Schreiber, who had been Sharethrough’s VP of marketing and communications for the past five years, also left the company. The executive departures are not part of broader layoffs, […]
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When It Comes To Receipts, One Shopper’s Junk Is A Data Company’s Treasure
The slang phrase “I’ve got the receipts” has become a way to declare oneself the indisputable winner of an argument. Mobile shopping and analytics companies are learning to love the term as well. As image scanning and recognition software improves and the value of shopper data shoots up, a growing industry is devoted to accessing […]
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Verizon-Yahoo Closes; Here Are The Next Challenges
Verizon completed its $4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s search, email and digital media assets on Tuesday, almost a year after announcing its intent to buy the first-wave internet giant. Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s embattled CEO since 2012, is leaving the company. Just because Verizon has cleared the first and most fundamental hurdle in creating Oath, the […]
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Why Safari’s Desktop Tracker Blocking Matters (Even Though Safari Desktop Doesn’t)
Apple’s announcement on Monday that its Safari desktop browser would block third-party tracking information by default worries the ad tech industry – even though Safari represents less than 5% of paid search clicks, according to data from performance marketing agency Merkle. But not everyone is alarmed. The change is likely just another stepping stone in […]