Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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How Pepsi Proves It’s Worth Going All-In On Super Bowl Marketing
A 30-second Super Bowl spot costs $5 million, and could be seen by 100 million live viewers. Depending on your perspective, it could be either the greatest opportunity or the biggest waste of the year. We know one brand’s perspective, at least. PepsiCo, a long-time Super Bowl partner, is back in force this year with […]
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Walmart Media Group Tests Xandr And The Trade Desk For DSP Role
Walmart Media Group (WMG), the retailer’s advertising business, is running a bake-off between Xandr and The Trade Desk to be its DSP partner for off-site advertising. Xandr and The Trade Desk each supported sponsored product campaigns for Walmart in Q4 last year, with the goal to drive site traffic at the lowest cost per click […]
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Amazon Emphasizes Brand Advertising Ambitions In Q4 Earnings
Amazon’s advertising business grew by about 40% year over year, in line with the annual growth of the overall “Other” segment, CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors during the company’s Q4 and year end 2019 earnings call Thursday. Advertising revenue is still a drop in the bucket compared to the $280.5 billion the entire company brought […]
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Google Extends A Hand To Programmatic As Its Privacy Rules Shake Up The Industry
As Google’s new data privacy policies roil the industry, the company’s ad tech and ad network businesses appear to be more open to industry collaboration in response. For instance, Google is coming around to some industry initiatives where it’s been a notable holdout. In spring of 2020, Google will implement Sellers.json, an IAB Tech Lab-backed […]
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Ad Tech Vets Look To Bring Their Data Expertise To Actual Vets
Ad tech expertise is increasingly finding its way out of the advertising industry and into seemingly unrelated verticals. The most recent example is Petabyte, a veterinarian and pet industry technology company that launched last month. The company’s initial product is a vet clinic management solution called Rhapsody. Petabyte CEO Michael Hyman and President Tim Mahlman […]
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How Oracle’s Rob Tarkoff Will Win The Next Stage Of Data And Ad Tech
Rob Tarkoff, EVP, Oracle CX and Data Cloud, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020. Oracle’s data division has had a tumultuous year. Eric Roza, Oracle Data Cloud chief, left last April, and was replaced by Rob Tarkoff, who ran the customer experience (CX) cloud unit. The data […]
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DoubleVerify Takes A Crack At CTV Fraud With New Supply Certification
DoubleVerify introduced a certification program on Tuesday to detect CTV fraud and invalid traffic. The exploding prices of streaming impressions have been a beacon for fraud, said Roy Rosenfeld, SVP of product management and head of DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab. “And there’s an opportunity for fraudsters because CTV as a medium and how ads are delivered […]
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As Election Nears, Ad Tech Looks Toward New Opportunities – And To Avoid Past Mistakes
With the 2020 US presidential election cycle heating up, advertising and technology companies are once again jockeying to secure their share of the coming deluge of political media budgets. But the commercial tech crowd is taking a more judicious approach to political advertising this time around, having learned some hard lessons in 2015 and 2016, […]
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Havas Tests Zeotap And InfoSum Data Partnership As Agencies Enter Onboarding
Brands are eager to onboard and match data sets, but don’t want first-party data to leave their own systems. They want user-level targeting, without the risk in trafficking actual consumer data. Zeotap and InfoSum are tackling this data paradox with an onboarding partnership, announced on Monday, that allows marketers and agencies to sync data from […]
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Facebook Holds Firm On Political Ad Policies, Will Still Allow Lies And Targeting
Facebook clarified its political advertising policy on Thursday. And the update is: No update. Facebook has been at the center of a PR and policy firestorm over its political advertising policies since October, when President Trump’s reelection campaign ran an ad featuring a lie about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. At the same […]