Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Is 2016 The Year Marketers Embrace Data Sharing?
OwnerIQ’s unique second-party data-sharing model, where it acts as media buyer and data broker between retailers and manufacturing brands, is showing signs of breaking through the initial skepticism which accompanied second-party marketing. The Boston-based company’s $40 million revenue from 2006 to late 2014 pales compared to its $60 million spike in 2015. Second-party data involves […]
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Goldman Sachs Continues Its Youth Outreach With Snapchat Campaign
Following a previous Snapchat campaign aimed at campus students from last year, Goldman Sachs is doubling down with a broad investment across the messaging service’s Discover and Live Story channels. Major financial players like American Express, Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America and JP Morgan have also been early adopters to Snapchat advertising. Goldman’s ad buy, which […]
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Pinterest Pins Targeting And CRM Matching Onto Its Tech Stack
Targeted advertising on Pinterest has taken a big step forward with the introduction new interest segments as well as first-party data matching. Pinterest hopes to “massively expand the categories for interest targeting” from 30 to 420, said product manager Nipoon Malhotra, who leads the company’s monetization team. And with its CRM data matching capability, Pinterest is following Google […]
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AdRoll Continues To Push Its Performance Suite Up The Funnel
AdRoll’s B2B data co-op IntentMap, unveiled eight months ago, has expanded its participating partners from 1,000 to 3,000 out of 20,000 overall clients. The prospecting co-op is a pool of shared advertiser data managed by AdRoll’s data science operation. “We think data co-ops will gain momentum over the course of the year,” said AdRoll President […]
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RNTS Media Strikes Again And Snaps Up Mobile Ad Exchange Inneractive
Berlin-based RNTS Media group, which owns a portfolio of mobile technology companies, will acquire Israeli RTB mobile ad exchange Inneractive for an initial payment of $46 million, which could rise to $72 million if Inneractive hits incentivized targets. This is the third in a string of acquisitions RNTS Media and its primary business property, the […]
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Why Brick-And-Mortar Stores Are The Next Big Attribution Hurdle
Call it the holistic grail: the ability to connect advertising, ecommerce activity and in-store buying with a single measurement. No one’s filled that gap yet, but a bunch of companies are taking incremental steps. Earlier this month the location analytics shop Placed added a product for attributing in-store lift to its suite. Then last week […]
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What Becomes Of A Campaign's Data Assets When A Presidential Run Is Suspended?
Have you ever wondered why presidential candidates only “suspend” their campaigns, even when they’re dropping out? It isn’t pride, it’s just good business. When the candidate is gone, the campaign’s valuable tech and data assets remain. Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign, for instance, ended suddenly and in considerable debt, which it helped pay down by selling or renting its proprietary data. Mark […]
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How The Trade Desk Cracked The DSP Market (Hint: It's All About The Agencies)
The Trade Desk has grown faster than probably any other DSP in recent years, as founder and CEO Jeff Green sought to capitalize on what he saw as strategic errors by rivals. “We saw that most of the DSPs had created channel conflicts for themselves,” said Green, a reference to some other DSPs’ media company […]
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With New Attribution Product, Foursquare Will Report On Retail Visits
A new attribution product from Foursquare will demonstrate in-store lift for media campaigns by linking ad exposures to likely retail conversions. Foursquare President Steven Rosenblatt called attribution “the holy grail of consumer advertising,” and said the product is a key step in the company’s long-term evolution from a consumer app to a data and intelligence […]
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Euro Carrier Three Is Latest To Embrace Network-Level Ad Blocking, Signs With Shine
British carrier Three Group became the second wireless service provider to integrate network-level ad blocking courtesy of Israel-based Shine. Following a recent trial of the technology, the telco’s regional groups Three Italy and Three UK will begin screening in-app and mobile browser ads for their 10 million to 15 million subscribers. The deal marks Shine’s […]
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Despite More Mass Media, Voters Are Harder Than Ever To Reach
The extreme fragmentation of digital media is tougher on national political campaigns than on brand advertisers. Because political campaigns must fight for every vote (at least once the primaries are done), discrete audiences that a brand marketer might dismiss as too difficult or small are essential to the political advertiser. The 3% of American adults that still connect […]
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Will The Ad Tech Ecosystem Ever Provide A Unified Front Against Ad Fraud?
Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]
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Criteo Reports A Positive Beat, With 2015 Revenue Above $1 Billion
Following a brutal 2015 for publicly traded ad platform companies (at least those not named Facebook or Alphabet), the first month of 2016 was, well, not much better. That is until Wednesday, when Criteo reported Q4 revenue growth of 55%, to $407 million (362 million euros). Additionally, the company crossed two symbolic milestones, hitting $1 […]
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Search And Social Make Gains, But It’s Still The Super Bowl Era
Say you’re an advertiser plunking down $5 million for 30 seconds of prime Super Bowl ad time. You’re going to want to make sure that campaign drives some sort of action online. But between Facebook, Google and Twitter, how do you choose what to use? According to a report released Monday, Google’s attribution engine, Adometry, […]
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Krux Opens The Doors On Link, Its First-Party Data Bazaar
Krux opened its business-to-business data-sharing marketplace, named Link, on Thursday with the goal of building an open exchange for media and marketer first-party data. The product has been in development for 18 months and live in beta with some clients for almost a year, according to Krux chief solutions officer and Link general manager Michael […]
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Mobile Location Data Aims To Connect OOH Campaigns To In-Store Sales
Location analytics company Placed announced Wednesday its attribution service would connect billboards to in-store traffic. It will do this via a mix of partnerships with holding company agencies and out-of-home (OOH) inventory suppliers like Clear Channel Media and cinema ad network NCM. “OOH is shifting,” said Michael Lieberman, COO of tenthavenue, an OOH agency within […]
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US And EU Officials Agree On New “Privacy Shield” Data Transfer Pact
US and European officials agreed Tuesday to a data-sharing deal that would replace the Safe Harbor pact. Safe Harbor had regulated commercial data sharing for 15 years until it was overturned by a European court last October after a privacy activist’s suit against Facebook. Few details have surfaced about the new deal, dubbed “Privacy Shield,” […]
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How Digital Video Is Developing In A Political World That Prefers TV
Unlike earned digital media, which is reinventing political campaigns, presidential candidates tend to view digital video as support for their flashy TV advertising. “The hope for digital, in my opinion,” said John Randall, VP of digital at the right-leaning agency CRAFT, “is that by 2020 we don’t even see a difference between TV and online or mobile video ads. But […]
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How Creative Responsibilities Are Coming To Tech And Media Agencies
When many creative agencies failed to pivot into mobile, tech and media companies converged on their own solutions. “Creative agencies were disinterested in making experiences for mobile,” said James Chandler, mobile director for the GroupM agency Mindshare. After all, app-oriented mobile campaigns aren’t built around flashy art or high-production videos. While this mentality frustrated him […]
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Sky Invests $10M In DataXu, With Eyes Toward Real-Time, Addressable TV
The British broadcaster Sky Media on Monday announced a $10 million investment in the DSP and DMP provider DataXu. Sky hopes the relationship will help it better understand programmatic advertising, said Jamie West, Sky Media’s deputy managing director, in a release. “The money substantiates the belief in each other’s companies,” said DataXu CRO Ed Montes […]
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Industry Preview 2016: For Platform Leaders, Getting Over Their Own Walls Is A Growing Concern
Megaplatforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon dominate every marketing niche they occupy, but they are still in the early stages of honing their measurement, targeting and advertising. In what will be a recurring theme in 2016, walled-garden players are still trying to formulate and communicate what value their data brings to brands, according to […]
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Why Data-Driven Political Marketing Is Easier For Dems
All presidential campaigns must contend with factors that tilt the playing field to one party or another, such as electoral districts, state demographics and incumbency. For the 2016 election, Democrats appear to have solidified advantages in tech, data and paid media that represent a similar fundamental force working in their favor. One straightforward example is TV inventory. […]
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Adroit Move: MediaMath Spins Retail Data Co-op Into New Data Offering Helix
MediaMath on Wednesday announced a new business unit, named Helix, meant to translate the company’s existing retail data assets into a unified product offering. The move follows a string of MediaMath investments in consumer data, beginning with the acquisition of Adroit Interactive in 2010 and continuing with the purchase of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions (later rebranded […]
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Flashtalking Acquires Encore, Adds Attribution Services To Its Offering
The ad server Flashtalking added attribution analytics to its platform Tuesday with the acquisition of Encore Media Metrics. The terms of the deal and valuation were not disclosed. “We think there’s a real opportunity in the market by bringing together in a bundle all the options for online advertising programs,” said Flashtalking CEO John Nardone. […]
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A Daunting Path For Danish Ad Tech Company Adform As It Enters The US Market
Following its $21.5 million funding round to close out 2015, the Danish ad tech company Adform will test the dense US market. The market entrance was confirmed by Julian Baring, Adform’s general manager of North American business, who was hired last August to build out operations in Canada and the US. European data and advertising […]
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Can Media Agencies Bring Order To The Chaos Of Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing found its stride in 2015, and some expect this year will bring it a big step closer to becoming a mature marketing channel. Influencer marketing has established itself as a media category, but “it will become even more important if done in an ordered and manageable way,” said Rob Norman, chief digital officer […]
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Political Pollsters Are Getting Crushed By Digital Measurement Challenges
“The world may have a polling problem,” declared Nate Silver, the former New York Times statistical wunderkind who’s since launched FiveThirtyEight under the ESPN banner, in an article last year. Silver made this claim following the failure of UK polls to predict results of the country’s general election last May. In the US, he noted […]
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Fight Against Malvertising Drives Business, But Winning Is Tough
Malvertising – or malicious online ads that spread code to commit ad fraud or access a user’s data – might not induce the same industry-wide concern of viewability and fraud, but it’s still an issue. An IAB report from November estimated the cost of malvertising attacks to be more than $200 million – And that’s […]
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GroupM Acquires The Exchange Lab To Combat Digital Buying Fragmentation
GroupM’s purchase of The Exchange Lab, a provider of marketing services and technology that connects multiple DSPs, comes at a time when agencies must tackle digital media fragmentation. While GroupM – WPP’s media-buying umbrella – faces walled gardens and siloed platforms, the Exchange Lab has a tool called Proteus, designed to provide a single interface […]
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Video Advertising Gets Subtle
The native ad specialist TripleLift recently finished testing and hit the market with a cinemagraph format, in which there’s an instant of motion within a static image. The cinemagraph format has existed for years, but its utility as an online advertising vehicle is just starting to permeate from social media platforms to the broader publishing community. […]