Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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For Advertisers, Amazon Video Direct Provides More Questions Than Answers
When Amazon debuted its Video Direct service on Tuesday, the media hailed it as a rival to YouTube. Video Direct lets content creators post and monetize video directly on Amazon’s Video and Prime platforms. Amazon isn’t commenting beyond the release, but there’s no standalone platform and the only launch partners are media publishers, film studios […]
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Bots And Fraudsters Are Feasting On Political Ad Dollars
Blood in the water brings sharks, and high CPMs bring bots. And political spenders, who often outbid brands on targeted inventory, are uniquely vulnerable to digital fraud and bots. “All the ingredients that typically happen for fraud are a part of the political marketplace,” said Mark Schlosser, senior sales director at the ad fraud security […]
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Adblock Plus Plans Its First Monetization Offer Beyond Its Controversial Whitelist
The German startup Eyeo GmbH, which owns Adblock Plus (ABP), debuted a partnership Tuesday with Sweden-based micropayments provider Flattr in which ABP users will pay for their online content in a new way. The service, called Flattr Plus, sets a minimum threshold for ABP users to pay each month for content. That monthly fee gets […]
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Oracle Marketing Cloud’s Integration Effort Changes Its Relationship With Clients, Partners
Like every marketing cloud, Oracle’s was built through acquisition. The tech giant has devoted more than $3 billion to construct a suite that includes campaign management or marketing automation from Responsys and Eloqua, data management solutions from BlueKai and Datalogix, omnichannel commerce through Maxymiser and online ad targeting tools like AddThis – among many others. […]
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Bleacher Report’s Race To Own The Social Graph (Before ESPN Does)
Turner-owned Bleacher Report is going all-in on social platforms because the chance to set roots in social broadcasting before ESPN does, whether or not reliable platform monetization is a mirage, is too tempting to ignore. Bleacher Report’s future success will “key off our ability to leverage the social graph,” said Rich Calacci, Bleacher Report’s CRO […]
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Three Things To Look Out For This Political Season
It’s been an odd presidential campaign, and this oddness has extended to the realm of political advertising. Here are three things to look out for as the primary season gives way to the general election. Is there enough TV inventory? There’s just too much money to push down the throat of linear TV, and it’s […]
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Mobile Search Growth Fuels Alphabet Q1
In the first quarter of 2016, Alphabet reported total advertising revenues of $18 billion, representing a 16% increase from the same period last year, though slightly below analyst expectations. Google CFO Ruth Porat, speaking on the company’s quarterly conference call after trading on Thursday, attributed the growth to the company’s mobile search business. Today’s earnings […]
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Beeswax Brings Its Bidder Solution Out Of Beta As Ad Nets Look To Reclaim Lost Ground
There are a lot of bidder tools in the market, so when Beeswax came out of beta last Thursday with a solution it calls “bidder-as-a-service” – with Foursquare as its flagship client – its focus was on customizability and price. “With Beeswax we can write our own algorithm for bidding,” said Peter Krasniqi, Foursquare’s VP […]
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HookLogic Has Plans To Expand, Gets Investment From LUMA Capital Partners
LUMA Capital Partners, the newly minted venture capital arm of LUMA Partners (per an SEC filing earlier this year), announced Wednesday its first public investment with the ecommerce performance marketer HookLogic. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. HookLogic, which positions search and display ads within a network of retail sites, is only six months […]
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Paid Media Kicks In (A Little) As Trump Shows Signs Of Weakness
When Reuters reported last month that the Koch brothers’ organization, Freedom Partners, would sit out the remainder of the primary, the reason given was a worry that “spending millions of dollars attacking Trump would be money wasted, since they had not yet seen any attack on Trump stick.” Political insiders now expect a change in […]
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Rocket Fuel’s Plan To Weather The Next Big Shake-Out In Ad Tech
Randy Wootton will speak about advertiser perceptions on April 14 at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco. The past couple of years have been a tumultuous adolescence for ad tech, and perhaps no single company embodies the growing pains as neatly as Rocket Fuel, with its near-solo public spotlight, its dispute over margin transparency and the rough […]
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Kik’s Bot Shop Hopes To Attract Brands – And Build Better Services For Users
The messenger app Kik, a chat service catering to teens, debuted its Bot Shop on Monday. The shop lets Kik users download chatbots – automated apps meant to simulate real conversation. The shop currently features 16 bots from companies like Vine, H&M, Funny or Die, The Weather Channel and J-14 (a celebrity mag geared toward […]
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How Academia Is Shaping Ad Tech And Platform Business Models
Susan Athey will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC.IO conference in San Francisco on April 14. Academia has a unique role to play in supporting the digital economy, as its members bring a completely different perspective to studying ad auctions. The academic underpinning of ad auctions isn’t new – Hal Varian, Google chief economist and early AdWords designer, […]
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Marketing Tech Incubated At UPenn Makes The Jump To Startup
The early-stage analytics startup Zodiac Metrics is introducing its solution to help retailers gauge the lifetime value of individual customers by analyzing CRM and live sales data. Retailers using the solution feed in data on who made purchases and how much was spent, and in return get an estimation of a customer’s potential value over […]
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Why The Open Exchange Isn’t Always Ideal For Political Buyers
Despite the advantages of programmatic buying, political advertisers hoping to go beyond the giant walled gardens owned by Facebook and Google see real challenges with the system. Those challenges include inventory scarcity, placement transparency and auction dynamics that don’t match up with brand spenders. Publishers who are hankering for political ad spend don’t always have […]
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Lotame Audience Optimizer Extends DMP Audiences Into Prospecting
Lotame released a tool on Monday called Audience Optimizer, an add-on to its data management platform (DMP) that uses lookalike modeling to help clients target prospects who are most likely to respond to their ad. The product has helped digital agency Rise Interactive, which beta tested Lotame’s Audience Optimizer over the past six months, expand […]
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GroupM Solution LIVE Panel Connects To WPP Data Assets
Beginning Monday, GroupM will offer a solution called LIVE Panel, designed to connect WPP’s data assets (mostly those owned by Kantar and the consumer-surveying company Lightspeed) with the GroupM media-buying agencies. It’s connectivity created by formalized workflow – essentially, LIVE Panel standardizes global data sets. So the biggest beneficiaries are GroupM’s multinational clients. GroupM Analytics […]
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Nielsen Catalina Solutions Debuts Measurement Service For Print To In-Store Sales
Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) and Time Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new measurement product for attributing offline sales to print magazine advertising. “It’s the culmination of years of work and of a lot of pieces coming together,” said Leslie Wood, NCS chief research officer. And the product relies on a dense web of partners and […]
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Three Big Web Companies Are Dominating Political Ad Budgets
Google, Facebook and Twitter have become powerful platforms for political candidates, and each has earned a line item on every campaign’s media plan. But it may require another election cycle before smaller players can break into the big time. In 2015, Borrell Research predicted $1.1 billion would be spent by political buyers on digital media […]
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Google Rolls Adometry And A Data Management Platform Into Analytics 360 Suite
Google on Tuesday launched an analytics service, Google Analytics (GA) 360 Suite, designed specifically for enterprise marketers. The suite consists of six products: the former GA Premium as the centerpiece; Adometry, rebranded as Attribution 360; the data management platform (DMP) Audience Center 360; Optimize 360, a website optimization and personalization product; Data Studio 360, an […]
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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 […]