Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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 […]
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Will Ads.cert Be The IAB’s Next Big Inventory Clean-Up Play?
Both the adoption of Ads.txt and commercialization of blockchain solutions have the IAB optimistic about the prospects for Ads.cert, a follow-up to Ads.txt that uses cryptographic security measures to authenticate inventory. While Ads.txt helps authorize inventory sources, it doesn’t solve the authentication problem, said Neal Richter, CTO of Rakuten Marketing and co-chair of the IAB’s […]
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L'Oréal Plan To Take Over Data Before Data Takes Over Marketing
Big consumer product brands like L’Oreal have soaked up as much data as possible in recent years as they try to assemble consumer profiles without the direct data enjoyed by ecommerce merchants and retailers. Doing so requires a multifaceted strategy. L’Oreal’s head of data acquisitions and partnerships, Aruna Paramasivam, described her company’s efforts along these […]
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General Assembly Taps Marketing Leaders For Skills-Based Credentials
Top data-driven marketing talent is hard to find and easy to lose. But a group of marketers from companies including Google, Bonobos, Priceline, Kellogg and L’Oréal joined the Digital Marketing Standards Board, an initiative launched this month by the technology and career development course program General Assembly (GA), in the hopes of refining the process […]
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Mobile Commerce: Grown-Up And Still Growing
The Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend showed how mobile has grown from a retail investment-and-innovation channel to a true pillar of US commerce. On Cyber Monday, mobile commerce crossed a new threshold with $2 billion in sales, according to data from Adobe. Black Friday of 2016 was the first time US shoppers spent more than $1 […]
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Affinio Raises $9M To Push Analytics Into Brand Ad Budgets
Affinio, a consumer analytics startup, announced a $9 million Series B round on Monday as the company expands its product into brand advertising. It has raised a total of almost $14 million, and investors include Whitecap Venture Partners and Social Starts. Affinio enhances a marketer’s interest graph by connecting first-party data, social media, a DMP […]
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How A DOJ Suit Vs AT&T-Time Warner Deal Could Impact Other 'Vertically Integrated' Media Deals
A legal challenge by the Department of Justice to the $85 billion merger of AT&T and Time Warner appears increasingly likely. And comments Thursday by DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim signaled a more stringent approach to antitrust enforcement than American businesses have seen in decades. The question now: Could the DOJ’s position mean curtains for […]
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Recount Surprise: Marc Pritchard's Agenda Under Siege As Activist Peltz Appears To Win P&G Board Seat
Activist investor Nelson Peltz of Trian Fund Management won a recount vote for a board seat at Procter & Gamble. In the wake of the early October vote, the initial vote count had Peltz down by a narrow margin, but that now appears to be wrong. In a statement shared with AdExchanger late Wednesday, the […]
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Marketing Budgets Ebb In Gartner Survey As Brands Demand Results
After years of consistent growth, companies have flat-lined or decreased their investments in marketing. Last year, the amount of overall revenue allocated to marketing hit a peak at 12.1% – but that, according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey, is down to 11.3% in 2017. Gartner’s research, released Tuesday, is based on 353 marketing executives at […]
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With Big Wins In Virginia, Democratic Campaign Tech Looks To Rebuild
After Democrats won an unexpected cascade of seats in the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday, liberal technologists and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are hoping to scale the programs behind those successful bids to other state races in 2018. Many of the data and technology products used by candidates in Virginia were backed by […]
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The Trade Desk Reports 50% Yearly Revenue Growth, And Charts Where It Will Find More
The Trade Desk reported net revenue of $79.4 million in the third quarter, a 50% jump over the same period last year. The Trade Desk increased its forecasted revenue for 2017 from $303 million to $306 million, and has beaten and increased its revenue guidance in all five quarters since its IPO. The company’s first […]
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Nestle Canada’s Programmatic In-House Strategy Thinks Global, Acts Local
Nestle Canada is exercising more control over its programmatic and first-party data practices, said Melissa Savage, the food and drink company’s programmatic activation manager in the country. But unlike within an ad agency holding company, which tries to centralize programmatic knowledge, brand transformation must occur regionally. Take the company’s plan to ramp up native video […]
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Cookie Consortiums Emerge To Combat The Walled Gardens
A number of ad tech-backed coalitions consolidating cookie pools have bubbled up this year to stave off Google, Facebook and Amazon running away with the market with their own scaled identity assets. And trends like Safari’s ITP cookie restrictions shift the advantage further toward the walled gardens with daily active users. AdExchanger looked at a […]
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Tracking The Fallout From Safari's Tougher Cookie Stance
Safari may represent a relatively low share of browser traffic, but Apple browser’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) could have an outsized effect if it redefines which technology companies can access cookie data. ITP, a cross-site tracking restriction feature with the new iOS 11, builds on Apple’s pre-existing rejection of third-party cookies with a machine-learning-based algorithm […]
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The Alphabet Growth Engine Is Still Humming In Q3 Earnings report
Alphabet’s headlong revenue growth continues to prove durable in spite of brand safety concerns, EU regulatory pressure, Russian election meddling and other controversies. The company reported total Q3 revenue of $27.7 billion, a 24% increase from the same period last year and beating analyst expectations by around $500 million. But the raw revenue growth is […]
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The Trade Desk Snaps Up Adbrain As Ad Tech Pursues Cross-Device Roots
The Trade Desk on Wednesday made its first-ever acquisition when it bought the cross-device identity graph company Adbrain, adding a data set of cross-device IDs to its own demand-side platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the acquisition isn’t expected to materially impact The Trade Desk’s earning report and adds a 20-person team […]
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Andreessen Horowitz Leads $30M Round In Customer Data Platform ActionIQ
ActionIQ on Monday raised a $30 million Series B round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. New York City-based ActionIQ is a customer data platform that collects and integrates enterprise data sources. The round brings ActionIQ’s total funding to about $45 million. The customer data platforms Segment and mParticle, which have raised $109 […]
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DSPs In A Tight Spot As Amazon, Google And In-Housing Make Gains
The more things change, the more things stay the same. At least that’s the case for the crowded demand-side platform (DSP) category, where Google and Amazon maintain their top-dog status. Meanwhile, independent, telco-owned and marketing cloud DSPs vie for a dwindling number of enterprise accounts, according to an Advertiser Perceptions survey of more than 700 […]
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Marriott Brings Customer Hospitality To Inhospitable Digital Media
Marriott is reshaping its marketing strategy around a customer identity graph called Flywheel the hotel chain developed to turn its segmented customer funnel into a single pipeline. Marriott began working on Flywheel last year to map its 100-million member loyalty program to Facebook audiences and targeting signals, like travel searches or when people are in […]
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Democrats, Left Behind Online, Push For More Digital Dollars
A year ago, the Democratic Party data-driven ecosystem, a network of consultants, liberal digital media agencies and campaign tech vendors, was confident it would hold the White House, flip the Supreme Court and maybe even reclaim a Senate majority. Now, there is a sense of urgency as Democrats up and down ballots seek to reclaim […]
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Procter & Gamble Beats Back Activist Investor, And Its Existing Brand Strategy Is Safe – For Now
Nelson Peltz, founding partner of Trian Fund Management, narrowly lost a bid to win a board seat with Procter & Gamble on Tuesday, following a vote at the company’s shareholder meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. Peltz and his Trian fund are known for waging aggressive proxy battles to obtain public company board positions and then using […]
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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 […]