James Hercher
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
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James Hercher
Articles By James Hercher
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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 […]
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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 […]