Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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The Startup Trying To Automate The Ad Platform Reconciliation And Refund Mess
The ad tech startup Vaudit, founded last year by Mike Hahn, aims to automate the process of campaign reconciliation atop major ad platforms.
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The Trade Desk Lays Out Its Case To Beat Walled Gardens. Does Wall Street Buy It?
The Trade Desk continued its shaky 2025 earnings schedule when it reported Q2 results on Thursday.
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Zillow Pilots Containerized RTB, As It Rethinks The Equation Of Quality And Cost
Zillow is the pilot brand advertiser to test a new programmatic buying strategy known as containerized RTB. The strategy embeds the DSP or ad-buying platform intelligence, in this case the startup Chalice Custom Algorithms, within the SSP, which is Index Exchange.
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Shell Shutters Its Volta EV Charging And Media Division
Volta Media, which is owned by the gas station and energy giant Shell, will be shuttered by November and its network of more than 2,000 charging stations will be dismantled this year.
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More Like No Yield: A New Book Explores How Google Soaked Up The Web’s Ad Profits
“I tried to write it so it’s not exclusively for ad tech nerds,” Ari Paparo told AdExchanger of his new book, about Google’s advertising dominance. “And I mean that affectionately.”
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The Soda Wars Are Over And Big Beverage Companies Won. Now What?
For a moment, it seemed that beverage aisles and refrigerator sections in chains across the country were cracking open for startups and independent brands to compete with Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper.
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Criteo Reports Flattish Q2 Earnings And Looks To Improve Its Total ‘Activated Media Spend’
Criteo’s Q2 earnings report on Wednesday was marked by flatness.
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Why You Should Know (And Use) The Marketing Efficiency Ratio Metric
The Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is a data-driven advertising metric that’s been around for many years but is now reaching mainstream, or to some at least, revered status.
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FC Barcelona Gets An AI-Powered Assist To Help With Everything From Marketing To Player Fitness
FC Barcelona is giving the beautiful game an AI-powered upgrade.
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Alphabet’s Revenue Skyrockets, And AI Overviews Gobble More Of The Search Pie
The web is hurting. Google is doing splendidly. Q2 was a “standout,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told investors on Tuesday, with “robust growth across the company.”
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Meet Blurbs, The Latest Startup Trying To Actually Explain What Programmatic Vendors Do
Although there are tens of thousands of vendors across the Lumascape, helpfully bucketed by dozens of three-letter acronyms (CDPs, DMPs, SSPs, etc.) ) – nobody has any idea what anybody does. And it’s not like press releases help.
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Prime Day Grows Up
This year’s Amazon Prime Day event stood out in a couple important ways. One is the blasé results of Prime Day; the other is the guerilla pricing tactics adopted by brands and merchants that sell on Amazon and elsewhere across the web.
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Why Alaska Airlines Sees Promise In Google Meridian
There’s no way around using an assortment of measurement methodologies, says Owen Bickford, the paid performance media director at Alaska Airlines. “I don’t think they can work in a vacuum.”
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksRockerbox’s Attribution Journey
Ron Jacobson took the classic programmatic startup route. Which is to say, he pivoted randomly from a software job at a bank (well, the New York Fed), landed at an ad tech company and later founded his own ad tech startup before getting acquired by yet another ad tech company.
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Why Advertisers Can’t Figure Out If They’re Monetizing Illicit Content On YouTube
For at least a year, Adalytics has observed creator accounts on YouTube eluding the platform’s IP and rights monitoring tech to distribute movies, shows and live sports that should be exclusive to streaming or cable subscriptions.
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Agentic Commerce For All
New Generation AI, a startup founded last year, is looking to build agentic AI products for brands and retailers of any size. It’s an exciting time, says Jonathan Arena, one of New Gen’s co-founders and a former product lead at Patreon.
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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.