Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Democrats Redirect Ad Dollars In Bid To Reshape Political Map
The old military saying that “generals are always fighting the last war” cautions those who are more concerned with history than with current challenges. It’s a worthwhile lesson for political spenders and media companies as the 2016 US election lurches toward an unexpected battleground map. State Of Play “So far, this election has been the complete opposite […]
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Magna Global Releases Sunny Programmatic Forecast As Ad Tech Exits Adolescence
Programmatic is growing, and it’s also growing up. That’s the message from the Magna Programmatic Growth Report released Friday. Magna projects global programmatic spend to grow from $19 billion this year to $42 billion in 2020. Non-programmatic spend is expected to grow from $27 billion this year to $31 billion, with programmatic becoming the default […]
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With Home Shoppers In Hand, HSN Looks To Expand Its Network
HSN, the broadcast network dedicated to home shoppers, is finding new digital revenue streams to support its core TV business. “We’re a marketing platform for brands we sell,” said Annemarie Frank, HSN’s VP of omnichannel marketing. “A lot of the brands we work with internally and have done well with us are looking for ways […]
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Facebook Tweaks Audience Network To Favor Advertiser Metrics
Facebook is changing the way it values ad placements across its Audience Network as part of an ongoing transition from proxy ad metrics to actual business conversions. “The dominant proxy for the industry, and it’s been true as well for us, is the click,” Facebook ad tech head David Jakubowski told AdExchanger. “[Except] no marketer […]
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WPP’s Xaxis To Acquire Triad Retail Media
Xaxis, the WPP Group-owned programmatic media platform, snapped up the ecommerce ad tech business Triad Retail Media on Thursday. Triad handles media sales for major ecommerce sites, including those operated by Walmart, Sam’s Club, eBay, StubHub, Staples and Toys R Us. Triad’s gross revenue was more than $500 million in 2015, up from approximately $170 […]
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Audience Buying Moves Down-Ballot
Democrat Karen Jacobs isn’t running any TV ads while campaigning for a state House seat in Texas. Even cheaper regional and local broadcast inventory is expensive because her squiggly district northeast of Dallas – known as one of the nation’s most gerrymandered – must hit multiple markets. The district skews heavily Republican so any TV spending would […]
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Native Programmatic’s Awkward, Growth-Spurt Years
Casie Attardi will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on October 26. Native inventory became a significant part of the digital marketing mix before industry stakeholders had the time to develop a sense of comfort and familiarity with native advertising. “Native, especially for in-app programmatic, evolved over a very short period of time,” said […]
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Mo’ Match Rates Mo’ Problems As Cross-Device Vendors Aim For Scale
Cross-device identity match rates have shot up in recent years, but brands and agencies remain skeptical of the results. “We were consistently disappointed with cross-device identity matches,” said David Kohl, CEO of the digital media advisory firm Morgan Digital Ventures. “There’s a gap in understanding of what’s possible between vendors and the buy side, [which […]
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Horizon Turns To Digital Attribution In Pursuit Of Cinema Ticket Sales
Media agency Horizon Media worked with Placed, a location analytics and attribution firm, on both companies’ first attempt to measure the impact of digital advertising on movie ticket sales. Horizon Media is the longstanding media buyer for the production studio STX Entertainment. It has worked with Placed for other advertisers, “and we started having conversations […]
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Google Expands Free Measurement Tech For Its Marketing Cloud
Google will expand its free marketing measurement software by adding an A/B testing product (Google Optimize), a data reporting and dashboard-creation tool (Google Data Studio) and new machine learning capabilities for Google Analytics. These products will be available in an open beta starting next month. “The ultimate goal is to provide a kind of analyst […]
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Political Tech Firms Eye Commercial Market In Pursuit Of Stable Budgets
A growing number of political ad tech and data analytics companies are pitching their services to brands and agencies. It’s been a challenging election cycle for political technology firms, which have been fending off agnostic companies that see tech as fundamentally more important than partisan affiliation. These newcomers have successfully pried open budgets that were […]
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The Trade Desk Share Price Surges In IPO Debut
Now trading on NASDAQ: The Trade Desk. The demand-side platform officially IPO’d on Wednesday morning, with shares trading between $28 and $30, smashing the company’s $16-to-$18-per-share projection (which it amended upward from $14 to $16 the day before its IPO). The stock price as of approximately 3 p.m. Eastern placed the company’s market cap close […]
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Retailers Push Investments In Augmented Reality, Even As Consumer Interest Dips
While consumer interest in augmented reality (AR) has risen and fallen like a tide, retailers and tech vendors see it as more than just a passing fad. Hybris Labs, the retail tech R&D division of SAP, began working on AR products in 2013 after Google Glass debuted, said Hybris Labs team lead Christian Neeb. “There […]
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This Year’s Hotness: Finding And Monetizing Pissed Off Voters
Every year, voter-targeting firms sell audience segments based on trending issues. “We look into our crystal ball and think about what’s going to be big come November,” said Andrew Drechsler, CRO at the liberal data firm HaystaqDNA. And this year, everybody’s crystal ball is showing the same thing: voters who are willing to split or […]
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Adblock Plus Shifts Into Ad Tech With SSP Offering
Germany-based Adblock Plus (ABP) on Tuesday debuted its beta supply-side platform (SSP) offering, called the Acceptable Ads Platform. It marks the company’s first move into an ad tech space it typically criticizes. “We’ve always called the Acceptable Ads initiative an ongoing experiment,” ABP ops manager Ben Williams told AdExchanger. “We’ve improved it over time, surveying […]
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The EU Ramps Up Regulatory Action As Pubs And Advertisers Lose Ground
In the past two weeks, the European Union has further expanded the scope of its regulatory powers and revealed more zealous plans to influence competition between digital properties. In late August, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) released net neutrality guidelines, which become law in 2018, that forbid practices like “fast lanes” […]
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The Trade Desk Amends S-1, Valued Between $550M And $600M
The Trade Desk expects a valuation between $550 million and $600 million, according to an amended S-1 filed Tuesday. The company will make 4.6 million shares available on the market, with an anticipated share price between $14 and $16. At the high end, it hopes to raise $85.9 million, compared to $86.3 million in its […]
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Ibotta Debuts App-To-App Marketplace For Mobile Commerce Partners
The shopping app Ibotta, which gives users cash back for purchases, has streamlined app-to-app buying. Tech from deep-linking vendor Button now allows Ibotta users to make purchases from apps in Button’s network, which includes Hotels.com, Groupon, Jet and Spring. Ibotta hopes to connect commerce apps into an easy-to-use marketplace. While it’s easy to link and […]
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In The Win/Lose World Of Political Advertising, Attribution Is Irrelevant
Digital ad experts are rising in the political campaign world, but digital’s unique measurement capabilities aren’t coming with them. A big part of the problem is that the nature of voting defies measurement. “On the political side, there’s only one interaction a person takes [i.e., his or her vote], and you don’t know for months […]
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Amazon Tests Data And Media Bundling As It Targets New Marketer Budgets
Despite Amazon’s legacy as a giant digital walled garden, marketers say it’s in the early stages of a major expansion into an ad platform model. Specifically, Amazon is testing ways to tie together its properties to form a more comprehensive, full-funnel offer, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the early products. Amazon didn’t return […]
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Digital Channels Make Their Move On Sports, The Last Broadcast Stronghold
Although the Rio Olympics broke its own record for reserved ad dollars set during the London Games in 2012, broadcast is losing its iron grip on live sports media. Ratings for NBC across a portfolio of Comcast-owned properties (like MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Golf Channel, Telemundo and the NBC smart-TV app channel) were down compared […]
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CMO Peter Horst Describes Hershey's Digital Marketing Path, From Bittersweet To Smooth
Peter Horst will speak at AdExchanger’s Omni.Digital conference in Chicago on September 8. After decades of focus on TV and print advertising, Hershey’s is “in the early stages of a long, judicious process of building out a data operation and translating our brands to a digital mindset,” according to CMO Peter Horst. AdExchanger spoke with Horst about […]
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Slow And Steady Gains, As Network Ad Blocker Shine Partners With African Telco
African mobile network Econet Wireless will pre-install Shine’s ad-blocking tech for 40 million subscribers across Zimbabwe, South Africa, Burundi and Lesotho. The deal, revealed Thursday, represents the Israeli startup’s third public telco partner and its second full integration. Although Econet will pre-install Shine’s network-level ad-blocking technology for all of its subscribers, government regulations require Econet […]
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How Donald Trump The Politician Affects Trump The Business
Is it the politics, or are gold-plated faucets not as desirable as they used to be? While Trump’s brand and marketability have boosted his presidential run, a collection of data points – including geolocation data tracking foot traffic to his hotel establishments – suggests the campaign has hurt his business. His companies have experienced some […]
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Facebook Signals Strong Anti-Ad Block Position
Facebook introduced a page-loading protocol on Tuesday that makes its ads almost indistinguishable from Facebook content, and thus prevents ad blockers from working on its site. Andrew Bosworth, the social media company’s VP of ads and business platform, said the change forces ad blockers to choose between not blocking ads or severely undermining the user […]
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On Terminology: "Programmatic" Haters Gonna Hate
While “programmatic technology” has come a long way, many longtime players in the space are now reckoning with the term. AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley penned op eds about the “death of programmatic.” Rubicon Project SVP of market development Jay Sears also has acknowledged the limitations of the terminology. AdExchanger reached out to ad tech executives, some […]
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GoDaddy Becomes The First Brand To Foray Into Programmatic Live Streaming
On Saturday, small businesses will get a chance to pitch ideas to a GoDaddy executive and other experts at the SheKnows Media conference. To drive viewers to the live-streamed event, GoDaddy will become the first brand to deploy a programmatic video live-stream ad unit from Traction Labs. The session is part of a sponsorship deal […]
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Trump Beat His Data-Savvy Rivals, But They Can Still Punch Back
While Ted Cruz’s suspended campaign committee endures to manage assets like fundraiser lists and voter profiles, it has no intention of contributing anything but the bare minimum of its valuable data to the RNC and its voter-file vendor, the Data Trust, said sources with knowledge of the Cruz committee’s plans. The Cruz committee is not […]
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Will Publishers Ever Get A Successful Day In Court Against Ad Blockers?
Many in the US digital media industry have cherished hope of a day in court against ad blockers. It’s a movement that began with a series of IAB summits last summer and which today is slipping along the spectrum from possibility to fantasy. A year ago, the most likely legal route focused on copyright infringement. […]
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Google Credits Mobile And Video Investments For Strong Revenue Growth
Google parent Alphabet finished out Q2 2016 with $21.5 billion in overall revenue, a 21% jump from Q2 2015. It’s also a notable acceleration of growth rate from that year-ago quarter, when top line revenue grew 11%. [Read the earnings release.] The company chalked up the faster growth to investments in mobile and video. “The strength of the quarter […]