Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Longtime Kroger Ad Sales Leader Cara Pratt On Her New Role At Circana
Cara Pratt, long-time Kroger ad sales leader and perhaps the most recognizable name in retail media, is taking the helm as President, Global Retail and Media at Circana.
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Microsoft Is Shutting Down Invest, The One-Time AppNexus DSP Business
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that it will shut down Microsoft Invest by March next year, to be replaced by a chatbot-style ad-buying product powered by Copilot.
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Sincera Offers A Free API For Some Of Its Prized Metrics
The Trade Desk released OpenSincera on Tuesday, a free API integration that posts ad impression data on publishers and tech vendors.
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The Trade Desk Returns To Form With A Strong Q1 Earnings Report
If you felt a strange gust around 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, it was probably just the cumulative sighs of relief across Wall Street as The Trade Desk shook off its Q4 blues with a better-than-expected first quarter earnings report.
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Magnite Softens Its 2025 Guidance, But Google’s Woes Are A Potential Goldmine
When it comes to third-party cookies on Chrome, Google’s plan to reverse course is neither here nor there, says Magnite CEO Michael Barrett. “Forget Privacy Sandbox,” Barrett said. “That thing was dead upon arrival.”
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Walled Gardens Are Winning Because Brand Marketers Want More Easy Buttons
Despite programmatic tech adoption, this world of three-letter acronyms is as foreign to some digital marketers as reading a medical journal.
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Programmatic Leaders Who Testified In The DOJ’s Google Suit Are Vindicated, And Still Not Done
AdExchanger spoke to a number of programmatic leaders who testified in the DOJ’s Google antitrust trial last September.
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Advertisers Finally Win Key Transparency Concessions From Google’s Performance Max
A long-awaited development: Advertisers will soon be able to see around three of the most important transparency blockers in PMax.
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The Possible Show: Can It Possibly Be A Tentpole Already?
The art-filled lobby of Miami’s Hotel Fontainebleau was overtaken by the trappings of ad tech this week for the third-annual Possible Conference, a show that’s rapidly established itself as an influential industry event.
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Yahoo Joins The CAPI Trend With The Launch Of Its Conversions API
Call Yahoo one of the converted. Yahoo DSP launched a new Conversions API (CAPI) product, following in the footsteps of Meta and other platforms such as Snap, TikTok and Pinterest with their own CAPI tools.
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As CTV Blooms, It’s Knives Out For The Trade Desk’s Take Rate
It’s knives out for The Trade Desk’s take rate as competitors slash the demand side’s margin and pile on the incumbent during a moment of rare vulnerability.
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Q1: Google’s Earnings Are Up, AI Is Growing – And All Controversies Are Neatly Ignored
Alphabet had another stellar earnings report. But neither its leadership nor investors ever mentioned the two landmark ongoing antitrust suits. Chrome’s reversal on third-party cookies also never came up.
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Beware The Platform Incrementality Trap
Incrementality measurement may be a sound methodology, but online ad platforms are not really bringing a steady river of new-to-brand customers with their incrementality-based solutions.
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksHow Ecommerce Brands Are Finding Customers During A Tempest Of Headwinds
Americans are dealing with tumultuous change. For an ecommerce ad agency, that means navigating the same tariff craziness, Temu advertisements being pulled from the US market, the Meta ad platform going haywire and platform AI solutions all looking to replace human agency services.
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How Chips Ahoy, A Product Everyone Knows, Went About Reinventing The Brand
Sabrina Sierant joined Mondelez more than 12 years ago, which seems like a prior age in shopping terms. In December 2019, she took on marketing for the US Chips Ahoy business, as Mondelez orchestrated a major rebrand and reinvestment in its cookie brand.
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Horizon’s Night Market Adds Jason Colon, Former Publicis Retail Media Leader
Jason Colon, until recently Publicis’ EVP and managing director of retail media, has taken a new role as EVP of Commerce Media at Horizon’s retail media agency Night Market.
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Oatly Brings Its Brand Voice To The Most Boring Corners Of The Web – Online Grocery Pages
Whether it’s on a shelf, on Instacart or an online shopping page, a brand needs to take advantage of every inch it has to express itself and entertain potential customers. At least that’s always been the perspective of Oatly, the Swedish oat milk brand known for self-deferential marketing.
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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.