Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Edible Arrangements Launches Its Edibles Brand With An Appetite Opportunity – And Risk
With “edible” in its name, how could Edible Arrangements not get into the budding cannabis delivery business?
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Yotpo Acquires The CDP Coho AI, Solidifying Its Pitch For Retention Over Incrementality
Yotpo, the retention-based marketing and analytics company, announced on Tuesday that it is acquiring fellow Israeli tech startup Coho AI, a customer data platform.
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Acadia Acquires Crush, Merging Two Retail Media And Marketplace Agencies
The retail media agency consolidation trend is still going with the announcement on Tuesday that indie shop Acadia has acquired fellow ecommerce marketplace ad agency Crush.
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Bots And Games Are Back (For Ad Tech)
What’s old is new. Time is a flat circle. Trends are cyclical. Choose your idiom, because this week’s episode grapples with two topics that are back in style (so to speak): bot traffic and the tantalizing dream of scaling programmatic in-game advertising.
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WPP Acquires Data Clean Room Startup InfoSum
WPP has bought InfoSum, a data clean room and collaboration startup. Terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, were not disclosed.
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Perplexity Takes Its AI Search Engine Out On A Shopping Trip
As most generative AI search engines focus on general adoption and subscription licenses, Perplexity AI is zagging toward advertising and commerce applications.
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How Comcast Is Convincing Digital Native Brands To Spend On TV
Comcast is trying to win over digital-native and social-savvy marketers for with its recently launched Universal Ads, a self-serve ad buying platform that makes it easier for SMBs to buy streaming TV inventory.
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Why Ad Tech Leads The On-Prem Revolution
The biggest cloud tech companies, – namely AWS, Snowflake, Databricks and the Google Cloud Platform – are investing heavily in their own ad tech and marketing verticals. But, funnily enough, ad tech vendors themselves tend to avoid the big public clouds.
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Wonder Group’s Plan To Win The Mealtime App Category Depends On Growing A Major Ad Business
Wonder Group, a restaurant tech and meal delivery company, snapped up Blue Apron in 2023, Grubhub a year later, then Tastemade earlier this month. Tastemade brings new capabilities, says Wonder Chief Growth Officer Daniel Shlossman. But it’s an important step in the company’s plan to become a 360-degree advertising player.
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How Colgate-Palmolive Got All Of Its Agencies To Report The Same Data
Getting dozens of ad agency partners around the world to work together is like herding cats – but Colgate-Palmolive was able to do it.
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Meet The Netflix Ads Suite, Introduced By Ads VP Nicolle Pangis
The Netflix Ad Suite, as the company is calling it, is set to launch April 1, the company’s new Advertising VP Nicolle Pangis disclosed during the Cynopsis and AdExchanger CTV Connect event in New York City last week.
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Learning To Live With Our New AI-Based Advertising Overlords
AI and machine learning services have come a long way in the past couple years, and these changes have introduced a whole new vocabulary for marketers trying to get a handle on how products like PMax work.
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Meet The Free Gaming Platform – Founded By An Ad Tech Vet – That’s Putting CTV Ads In Video Games
Video gaming is the only market where revenue is largely tied to the sales of consoles and ad-free subscription services, André Swanston tells AdExchanger.
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Tillamook’s Takeaways From Becoming A National Grocery Brand
“There were some lessons early on,” Dawn Brodehl, Tillamook’s manager of omni-shopper marketing, tells AdExchanger of the company’s expansion to a national brand. For one thing, did you know that ice cream and dairy products can explode when they’re shipped over the Rocky Mountains?
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Publicis Acquires Lotame, Marking The End For One Of Ad Tech’s Evolutionary Wonders
Publicis Groupe continued its years-long streak of acquiring non-agency ad tech and data sales companies with the announcement on Thursday that it has bought Lotame, a data management system for advertisers and publishers.
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Target Reports Soft Store Sales But Optimistic Ad Revenue
Target reported $649 million in revenue from its Roundel advertising business in 2024, up about 25% from 2023, during its Q4 and full-year earnings report on Tuesday.
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Viant Acquires Lockr, And It’s All About Connecting IDs
Viant announced that it acquired Lockr, a consumer and business service for managing email inboxes and data opt-ins, during its Q4 earnings call Monday.
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IAS Outperforms Ad Tech’s Q4 Slump And Outgrows Its Verification Roots
Integral Ad Science broke a streak of punishing quarterly earnings reports for public ad tech companies when it announced better-than-expected Q4 results on Friday morning.
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Why Return Rates Will Someday Be A Key Retail Media Metric
Today’s roundup deals with an uncomfortable topic that, at some point, retail media companies must reckon with. It’s not transparency, or MFA, or standardization. It is the issue of rising return rates.
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‘Is The Open Internet Healthy?’ Magnite Reports CPMs Dipped In Q4
Magnite ended up with a scrappy 4% year-over-year growth rate in Q4 2024, after a sudden, unexpected drop in display and online video CPMs during November and December, which caused the company to miss its revenue guidance.
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Seeing Through The Hype: The Difference Between AI And Machine Learning In Marketing
There are many open questions for marketers who want to implement AI-driven ad tech – and for customers considering the new AI-powered Oral-B. What does it even mean when a vendor touts its AI capabilities?
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Walmart’s Ad Business Cleared $4 Billion In 2024 And Is Only Getting Started
Walmart’s ad business is starting to click. The company generated $4.4 billion in global ad revenue in 2024, up 27% year-over-year, the company disclosed in its latest earnings report on Thursday.
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For Snack And Candy Brands, This Is The Start Of The Ozempic Era
2025 is officially the year that GLP-1 solidifies itself as a force in the advertising world.
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How Data-Driven Retail Marketers Try To Manage The Unmanageable
Last week, at an industry event hosted by RTB House, a group of retailers took the stage to discuss their plans (and frustrations) with data-driven advertising this year.
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The Trade Desk Promises Big Changes After Missing Its Q4 Guidance
“For the first time in 8.5 years as a public company, our results came in below expectations,” The Trade Desk CFO Laura Schenkein told investors during the company’s Q4 and full-year 2024 earnings reports on Wednesday.
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Kevel Extends To Walled Garden Retail Media With Nexta Acquisition
The convergence of on-site retail and shopping across the web got a little more converged on Tuesday with the news that Kevel has acquired Nexta.
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Lawmakers Demand Answers From Ad Tech Vendors Allegedly Monetizing CSAM
On Friday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) sent co-written letters to Amazon, Google, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, the MRC and TAG notifying the companies that they have been identified as “responsible for serving or certifying” ads on pages hosting child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
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Amazon Advertising Raked In $17 Billion During Q4, And It’s Still Speeding Up
Amazon’s advertising services group earned $17.3 billion in Q4 2024, up 18% year over year.
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Criteo’s Investors Like Its New Enterprise Software Status (And Its Free Cash Flow)
Criteo’s shares leapt more than 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported continued profitability growth and a strong financial footing.
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Nodals AI Launches As The Latest Custom Algo Replacement For Ad Tech
Nodals AI launches, with its own spin on the custom algorithm ad tech category.