Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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The Alphabet Moneymaking Machine Grows Despite All Challenges
Alphabet is beset by challenges on all sides. But the company’s revenue growth remains unchecked.
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Why Chinese Ecommerce Ad Budgets Hang In The Balance
Chinese advertisers and ecommerce companies have become a force in American shopping. What happens now?
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Why Button’s New CRO Sees Retail Media As A Revenue Lifeline
Lauren Newman, a news publishing and affiliate marketing vet, has high hopes for commerce media to turn things around.
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Retail Tech Is Ready To Help Retailers Solve All The Wrong Problems
Brick-and-mortar retail is blowing it – and their efforts were on full display at the NRF’s Big Show in New York City last week.
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Rokt Acquires mParticle For $300 Million
Commerce media just went shopping. On Thursday, ecommerce marketing company Rokt acquired customer data platform mParticle for $300 million.
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People Managing Google Ad Campaigns Are Getting Their Accounts Seized By Scammers
Multiple criminal rings around the world are orchestrating surgical phishing scams that target ad industry media buyers. Specifically, fraudsters are duping ad buyers who log in to Google Ads after running a Google Search.
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Why Grassland Beef Put A Vendor In Charge Of Search And Social, Not The Platforms
Putting an independent vendor like Albert AI in charge of its search and social campaigns means Grassland Beef retains visibility and control over its marketing.
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2025 Is The Year Ad Tech Goes To The Clouds
Ad tech is headed to the stratosphere. As in, on the way to becoming part of the cloud infrastructure technology.
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Can Generative AI Unlock Streaming Media To Millions Of New CPGs And SMBs?
The killer application for generative AI tech in TV advertising right now is very simple: auto-creating videos that small and local businesses can use to run CTV and streaming TV ads.
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Experian Launches Its First-Ever Third-Party Data Marketplace
This week, Experian launched its own marketplace for third-party data vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
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The Ad Measurement Trends That Reshaped Online Advertising This Year
2024 was a year of hectic change for ad measurement. These are a few of the new ad attribution trends and techniques programmatic advertiser should know going into 2025.
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Is 2025 The Year Of Retail Media Standardization?
Achieving consensus on the definitions for even baseline retail media metrics required a tough 18-month slog. Unfortunately, this was the easy part.
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksFor Incrementality Testing, It’s One Step At A Time
What is incrementality testing? “I’ve been doing more interviews with journalists lately and realize I need a better answer to this question,” says Haus Head of Strategy Olivia Kory.
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Sonos Goes Back To Basics With A Holiday Brand-Building Campaign
Sonos chief marketer Jordan Saxemard spoke with AdExchanger about balancing brand and performance marketing and the evolution toward a new hybrid kind of ecommerce and retail shopping.
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Why Retail Media Is Spurring Agency Conglomeration
Retail media and tech platforms now represent a return to agency scale dynamics. The proposed Omnicom and IPG merger is the latest example.
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Mars United CEO Rob Rivenburgh On Selling To Publicis, And Where Retail Media Goes Next
“It’s going to be harder for [indie agencies] to compete,” said Rob Rivenburgh, the CEO of Mars United, who also now leads the Publicis Commerce global group.