Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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 […]
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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 […]