Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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UK Telco Tests Network-Level Ad Blocking, As Ad Industry Awaits The Fallout
The British mobile carrier Three Group on Wednesday began a 24-hour trial of the network-level ad-blocking blueprint it’s been working on since earlier this year. Three deploys its ad blocking through a partnership with the Israeli startup Shine, which installs ad-block tech on telco networks and facilitates new opt-in advertising arrangements between mobile providers and […]
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Democrats Have High Expectations For 2016 As Their Tech And Data Advantage Widens
The last two presidential elections were decided in part by the Democrats’ superior tech and data infrastructure. While the Republicans have since invested in bolstering their own expertise, the Dems believe they still have the upper hand. “Republicans who see our tools still say our solutions are much better than what they have on their […]
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How The ANA Rebate Controversy Could Impact Ad Tech
The ANA report on agency transparency erupted last week, intensifying a long-expected public dispute between brands and their media agencies. While the report focused on brands and agency holding companies, its findings could potentially affect ad tech companies. AdExchanger reached out to some leaders in the ad tech sphere to see how they viewed the […]
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HookLogic Releases Retailer Exchange And Attribution Products, Challenging Amazon’s Retail Hegemony
HookLogic, which places ads on its retail clients’ ecommerce sites, on Tuesday released two products that expand the reach of its ad-serving capabilities. The company will place ads on platforms such as Google and Facebook, and has introduced the attribution tool HookLogic 360 to measure within its retail network. It also revealed a unique way […]
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Another Ad Blocking Solutions Vendor, With A New Approach
Admiral, a performance marketing solution designed to help publishers reacquire and monetize audiences who use ad blockers, launched Monday with a $2.5 million seed round. Admiral identifies audiences with ad blockers turned on, works to re-establish those users (by opting in to a lightened ad experience, say, or asking to be whitelisted) and then makes a […]
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Trump's Intuitive Politics Spell Trouble For Republican Data Ops
Data figured centrally in Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaign operations. Hillary Clinton is running a similar playbook. Mitt Romney and Ted Cruz both leaned heavily on technology-enabled voter analysis. But Donald Trump isn’t interested in the data-gathering infrastructure many see as a necessary piece of modern presidential campaigning. “I’ve always felt it was overrated,” […]
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Instagram Adds Business Accounts, A Potentially Valuable Data Source
Facebook-owned Instagram debuted business profiles and account tools on Tuesday. While many personal accounts are used for business, Instagram formalized the system and added promotional capabilities like putting spend behind a post and basic targeting, measurement and reporting tools. While business accounts aren’t meant to be an enterprise-class solution, the vast majority of advertisers on Instagram […]
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The Facebookization Of Instagram Continues – And Everything Else Is Next
Instagram announced Tuesday that it’s opening up its advertising Partner Program to a new category of member: media buyers. The program today is comprised of a set of about 50 vendors certified for Instagram’s ad tech, content marketing and community management services. Bringing media buying services into the fold is the natural next move for Instagram […]
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The Influencer Perspective On Cross-Channel Marketing
Social influencers and content creators, many of whom first distinguished themselves by making and distributing content on a single platform (Instagram influencers, YouTube creators and Vine aficionados), are benefitting from platform proliferation. Nicola Foti, for instance, parlayed his experience making personal videos and sketches on YouTube for more than half a decade into a multichannel […]
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Facebook Brings Branded Video Ads To Audience Network
In a significant expansion of its video ad offering, Facebook will bring video ad formats to its Instant Articles platform and to the external apps and sites in its Audience Network, the company announced Monday. It’s the first time the company will deliver video ads beyond its owned-and-operated properties – excluding its LiveRail video sell-side […]
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To Head Off Mobile Fraud, 'Know Thyself'
Eliza Nevers, Christian Calderon and Michael Oiknine will participate in a panel discussion on mobile fraud at the May 24 CLEAN ADS I/O conference in New York. AdExchanger: What’s the single biggest thing marketers contending with mobile ad fraud should be focused on? MICHAEL OIKNINE, CEO of Apsalar: Fraud has become such a problem in large part […]
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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 […]