Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Crisp Acquires Cantactix, As Ad Tech And Analytics Unite Around Retail Data
Crisp announced its acquisition of Cantactix, an in-store analytics company which helps retailers optimize their shelf space.
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How DoorDash And Symbiosys Plan To Collaborate Post-Acquisition
What’s DoorDash’s post-acquisition plan for the retail media ad tech startup Symbiosys?
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CoComelon And Blippi Get Into The Ads Services Biz To Target Parents
Moonbug, producer of kids programs like CoComelon and Blippi, introduced a services package that includes media buying, creative production, YouTube account operation, program sponsorship, programmatic audience extensions and analytics.
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Dentsu Announces A Strategic Integration With Criteo To Incorporate Retail Audience Data
Dentsu and Criteo announced a strategic partnership to consolidate their respective retail audience data within Dentsu Connect, the agency holding company’s data and identity product.
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The Trade Desk Introduces A Native App On Snowflake For Retail Conversion Data
The Trade Desk on Thursday announced its first native app built for use with a separate cloud or data warehouse. It’s called the Connector App on Snowflake.
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Family Safety App Life360 Launches Location-Based Ad Targeting
Life360, a popular family safety and tracking app, announced its first location-based ad targeting solution, called Place Ads, and a foot-traffic analytics product named Uplift that measures store visitation.
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DoorDash Dashes Deeper Into Ads With Its $175 Million Acquisition Of Symbiosys
On Wednesday, DoorDash announced its acquisition of Symbiosys, a retail search ad startup that launched two years ago. The deal price is $175 million.
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The Trade Desk Adds Instacart And Ocado As First SKU-Level Retail Data Sellers For Self-Serve Advertisers
The Trade Desk is adding a new retail tool to its data marketplace toolkit – or a new element to its periodic table, if you will.
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The Next Phase Of Retail Media Is A Brand New World For Programmatic Vendors
This week, we’re checking in on Pacvue, an ad-buying platform for sponsored listings and retail search results that sits right at the heart of open programmatic retail media.
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The Trade Desk Launches Deal Desk, Its Bid To Make Deal IDs Not Terrible
For The Trade Desk, about 90% of campaigns using structured deal IDs via private marketplaces don’t scale at all. Fixing this frustrating deal ID failure rate was the impetus for a new product called Deal Desk.
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How Chocolate Brand Tony’s Chocolonely Made Friends In American Candy Aisles
Tony’s Chocolonely is now a national grocery brand. Which means it’s needed to add paid media to its marketing repertoire at last.
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James & James Is Using MMM To Keep Its AI-Based Ad Buying 'Honest'
Although furniture brand James & James was hitting its own aggressive revenue targets while primarily spending on search and social ads – the facts told a different story.
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How Kellanova Feasts On Purchase Data
The CPG holding company Kellanova, which owns Pop Tarts, Pringles, Eggo and many other well-known grocery brands, is perusing data suppliers in pursuit of purchase-based data to snack on.
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Google And Amazon Flex Their AI-Powered Ad Tech And Creative Suites
Google and Amazon compete for people’s time and wallets, and for advertisers’ budgets. And on Wednesday, they both kicked off their marketing industry conferences and announced a round of big ad tech news.
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The Legality Of RTB In Europe Has Been Settled, And Nobody’s A Winner
At long last the most prominent GDPR case targeting the legal standing of the IAB Europe’s Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) has been settled.
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Longtime Kroger Ad Sales Leader Cara Pratt On Her New Role At Circana
Cara Pratt, long-time Kroger ad sales leader and perhaps the most recognizable name in retail media, is taking the helm as President, Global Retail and Media at Circana.
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Microsoft Is Shutting Down Invest, The One-Time AppNexus DSP Business
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it will shut down Microsoft Invest by March next year, to be replaced by a chatbot-style ad-buying product powered by Copilot.
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Sincera Offers A Free API For Some Of Its Prized Metrics
The Trade Desk released OpenSincera on Tuesday, a free API integration that posts ad impression data on publishers and tech vendors.
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The Trade Desk Returns To Form With A Strong Q1 Earnings Report
If you felt a strange gust around 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, it was probably just the cumulative sighs of relief across Wall Street as The Trade Desk shook off its Q4 blues with a better-than-expected first quarter earnings report.
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Magnite Softens Its 2025 Guidance, But Google’s Woes Are A Potential Goldmine
When it comes to third-party cookies on Chrome, Google’s plan to reverse course is neither here nor there, says Magnite CEO Michael Barrett. “Forget Privacy Sandbox,” Barrett said. “That thing was dead upon arrival.”
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Walled Gardens Are Winning Because Brand Marketers Want More Easy Buttons
Despite programmatic tech adoption, this world of three-letter acronyms is as foreign to some digital marketers as reading a medical journal.
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Programmatic Leaders Who Testified In The DOJ’s Google Suit Are Vindicated, And Still Not Done
AdExchanger spoke to a number of programmatic leaders who testified in the DOJ’s Google antitrust trial last September.
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Advertisers Finally Win Key Transparency Concessions From Google’s Performance Max
A long-awaited development: Advertisers will soon be able to see around three of the most important transparency blockers in PMax.
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The Possible Show: Can It Possibly Be A Tentpole Already?
The art-filled lobby of Miami’s Hotel Fontainebleau was overtaken by the trappings of ad tech this week for the third-annual Possible Conference, a show that’s rapidly established itself as an influential industry event.
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Yahoo Joins The CAPI Trend With The Launch Of Its Conversions API
Call Yahoo one of the converted. Yahoo DSP launched a new Conversions API (CAPI) product, following in the footsteps of Meta and other platforms such as Snap, TikTok and Pinterest with their own CAPI tools.
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As CTV Blooms, It’s Knives Out For The Trade Desk’s Take Rate
It’s knives out for The Trade Desk’s take rate as competitors slash the demand side’s margin and pile on the incumbent during a moment of rare vulnerability.
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Q1: Google’s Earnings Are Up, AI Is Growing – And All Controversies Are Neatly Ignored
Alphabet had another stellar earnings report. But neither its leadership nor investors ever mentioned the two landmark ongoing antitrust suits. Chrome’s reversal on third-party cookies also never came up.
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Beware The Platform Incrementality Trap
Incrementality measurement may be a sound methodology, but online ad platforms are not really bringing a steady river of new-to-brand customers with their incrementality-based solutions.
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksHow Ecommerce Brands Are Finding Customers During A Tempest Of Headwinds
Americans are dealing with tumultuous change. For an ecommerce ad agency, that means navigating the same tariff craziness, Temu advertisements being pulled from the US market, the Meta ad platform going haywire and platform AI solutions all looking to replace human agency services.
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How Chips Ahoy, A Product Everyone Knows, Went About Reinventing The Brand
Sabrina Sierant joined Mondelez more than 12 years ago, which seems like a prior age in shopping terms. In December 2019, she took on marketing for the US Chips Ahoy business, as Mondelez orchestrated a major rebrand and reinvestment in its cookie brand.