Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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Learning To Love And Let Go Of Attribution Models
Here’s an uncomfortable question for any data-driven advertiser: Is there a good way to measure and attribute marketing campaigns?
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Amazon Lays Out Its Next $50 Billion Opportunity In Advertising
In its sales pitches, hands-on-keyboard sessions and during conversations with ad tech vendors and Amazon sellers, Amazon consistently combined its content fortress with AWS and its investments in AI and machine learning.
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Why Mondelez Piloted A Shopper Marketing Test Between Albertsons And Fetch
“I always said, I think we need to change our title, because it’s not the old school shopper marketing,” said Anne Martin, director of shopper marketing for Mondelez International, which owns Oreo, Ritz, and a variety of other snacks.
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Mid-Tier Ecommerce Marketplaces Are Trying – And Failing – To Make The Numbers Work
Perhaps you’ve noticed – How could you not? – that there is massive competition among the largest ecommerce retailers to be the quickest, cheapest option online. But the mid-tier of ecommerce marketplaces are suffering.
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TikTok Shop’s Biggest Strength Is Its Biggest Weakness
Legislative drama notwithstanding, it’s time to look at TikTok Shop as a first potential sign that live online shopping in the US can be, well, a thing.
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Intent IQ Has Patents For Ad Tech’s Most Basic Functions – And It’s Not Afraid To Use Them
An unusual dilemma has programmatic vendors and ad tech platforms worried about a flurry of potential patent infringement suits.
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Perry Ellis Enlists Wunderkind To Revitalize Its Email Game
For fashion company Perry Ellis, the development of a strong first-party data strategy has also meant a ground-up rethinking of the company’s email marketing.
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Retailers Are Opening Themselves To Programmatic – But Will They Regret It?
Most retailers are long past withholding their shopper data from programmatic tech. They prefer the low-hanging fruit. But was that a good decision?
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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.