Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Buried DOJ Evidence Reveals How Google Dealt With The Trade Desk
In the process of the investigation into Google, the Department of Justice unearthed a vast trove of separate evidence. Some of these findings paint a whole new picture of how Google interacts and competes with its main DSP rival, The Trade Desk.
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Pacvue Enters The Next Chapter Of Retail Media With New CEO Rahul Choraria
Pacvue has promoted COO Rahul Choraria to chief executive.
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The Wonderful Brand Discusses Testing OOH And Online Snack Competition
Wonderful hadn’t done an out-of-home (OOH) marketing push in more than 15 years. That is, until a week ago, when it began a campaign across six major markets to promote its new no-shell pistachio packs.
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Google Ads, Analytics And Merchant Center Are Glitching Out Of Control. Here’s Why
Over the past month alone, there was a major Google Search ranking bug, a calamitous data breach involving Google Ads and Google Merchant Center and outages across Google Ads, the Analytics API outages and Google Merchant Center.
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How Incrementality Tests Helped Newton Baby Ditch Branded Search
In the past year, Baby product and mattress brand Newton Baby has put all its media channels through a new testing regime for incrementality. It was a revelatory experience.
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Can E.L.F. Cosmetics Become A Consumer Destination, Not Just A Brand?
History can be a burden for a brand, if it means that company is too set in its ways to pivot and try new things. Just consider e.l.f. Cosmetics, the digitial-first, social-native brand that made good.
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DTC Brands Are Learning The Hard Way That Winning In Retail Can Be A Losing Bet
Digital-native brands need to figure out how to win in retail shelves. They’re finding it difficult, to say the least.
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TikTok Wants To Win All The Screens, Not Just Your Smartphone
“There are billions of additional screens outside of mobile phones,” says Dan Page, TikTok’s global head of partnerships and new screens. “We want to be in all of them.”
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The Trade Desk Says UID2 Has Now Reached ‘Critical Mass’
The Trade Desk delivered another smash earnings report. Meanwhile, Unified ID 2.0, the open-source identity initiative, has “reached a critical mass of adoption,” CEO Jeff Green told investors.
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Publicis Acquired Retail Tech With Agency Clients – And Now Those Agencies Want Out
Many of Publicis’ fastest-growing and most strategic business units – including CitrusAd, Profitero, Epsilon and Conversant – earn a large chunk of their revenue from other agencies. Is that a problem?
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Adalytics Report Challenges Verifiers And Pubs That Claim 100% Brand-Safe Media
In the crosshairs this time: media sellers with masses of user-generated content, including movie and video review forums with unmoderated comment and discussion sections.
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A Google Ads Glitch Likely Triggered A Data Breach Within Google Merchant Center
A major Google glitch caused unencrypted customer and product info to be shared between Google Merchant Center accounts for at least two weeks.
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Amazon Advertising Earned $50 Billion Over The Past 12 Months, And It’s Just Getting Started
Amazon’s Advertising Services segment is delivering the dough. It generated $12.8 billion last quarter, up by a cool $2 billion year over year.
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Criteo Touts Its Agency And Walled Garden Partners
Q2 was relatively ho-um for Criteo. Its revenue ticked up by just 1%, although the company did move from a net loss of $2 million in the year-ago quarter to a $28 million profit.
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The Biggest CPGs Face New Pressures To Increase Ads While Somehow Spending Less
In the past couple of weeks, many of the world’s biggest CPG and grocery store brands have reported their latest earnings. One thing is clear: CPG brands are under pressure by retailers to squeeze their margins, lower prices and spend more on ads.
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DoubleVerify Breaks The Moat And Storms The Social Castle
What do Pepsi, Ulta Beauty and AB InBev have in common? A year ago, they were Moat clients. Now they’re in DoubleVerify’s camp.
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Vendors Like RTB House And Raptive Bought Into The Privacy Sandbox. Do They Feel Burned?
For some, Chrome’s news that it’s keeping third-party cookies was a moment of vindication. But was it a cruel blow to partners that tested the Privacy Sandbox in good faith?
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The FTC Orders Companies To Disclose Info On “Surveillance Pricing”
The FTC is ordering data from eight companies, which Commissioner Lina Khan describes as part of a “shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen,” in pursuit of visibility into “surveillance pricing.”
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Alphabet Earnings Earn A Shrug From Investors, But Nobody Else Can Keep Up
Alphabet is so big that, even when it’s growing slowly – YouTube, for example, disappointed with a lower-than-expected growth rate – it’s still outpacing competitors.
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Programmatic Companies Wrestle With ID Bridging And What Counts As Fraud
In January, the Chrome browser removed third-party cookies for 1% of users, to facilitate testing of the Privacy Sandbox – and a new controversy was born.
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It’s Open Season On SaaS As Brands Confront Their Own Subscription Fatigue
For CFOs and CEOs, we’ve entered a kind of open hunting season on martech SaaS.
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TripleLift CEO Dave Clark Abruptly Exits After Setting The SSP On A New Trajectory
Dave Clark, who’s led TripleLift for the past two years, is stepping down, effective immediately, and is being replaced by a coterie of TripleLifters.
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Moloco Invests In Its Competitor Topsort As The Retail Media Stakes Go Up
Topsort can lean into Moloco’s algorithmic personalization, while Moloco benefits from Topsort’s footprint with local retailers in the US and in Latin America.
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Uber’s Evolution Shows How Retail Media Will Get More Complicated – And Lucrative
This week, we take a dive into the Uber Eats advertising business, which drove from no formal ad business two years ago to being on pace to earn more than a billion dollars from advertisers this year.
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CDP BlueConic Acquires First-Party Data Collection Startup Jebbit
On Wednesday, customer data platform BlueConic bought Jebbit, which creates quizzes, surveys and other interactive online plugs for collecting data from customers.
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Why Vodafone Is Giving Out Grades For Its Creative
One way to get a handle on your brand creative is to, well, grade your homework, according to Anne Stilling, Vodafone’s global director of brands and media.
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How Old-School Retailers Like Academy Are Getting Hip And Adapting To Digital-First Sales
Academy Sports and Outdoors, a sporting goods chain founded in 1938, is trying to get trendy.
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Inside The Fall Of Oracle’s Advertising Business
By now, the industry is well aware that Oracle, once the most prominent advertising data seller in market, will shut down its advertising division. What’s behind the ignominious end of Oracle Advertising?
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Platforms Are Autogenerating Creative – And It’s Going To Be Terrible
This week, we’re diving into the most important thing in advertising – the actual creative – and how major ad platforms are well on their way to an era of creative innovation. Actually, strike that. I meant creative desolation.
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Verve Acquires Jun Group, A Mobile Video And Gaming Network, For $185 Million
Verve strikes again! This time, it snapped up Jun Group, a mobile video and gaming ad business, for $185 million.