Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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Advertible Makes Its Case To SSPs For Running Native Channel Extensions
Companies like TripleLift that created the programmatic native category are now in their awkward tween years. Cue Advertible, a “native-as-a-service” programmatic vendor, as put by co-founder and CEO Tom Anderson.
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The Trade Desk Adds CVS Retail Data And Relishes The Small Wins In Retail Media
Incrementality is a retail media term for attribution. It’s the attempt to measure the actual contribution of advertising to a business’ bottom line. But in a market where everything old is new and everything new has been done a thousand times, it’s important to focus on other kinds of incremental gains.
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TransUnion And Ally Bank Pilot The Notion Of A Movable Middle Audience
TransUnion is proposing advertisers target what it calls the “movable middles,” or category buyers who are not loyal to a particular brand.
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Why It Matters That Google Merchant Center Is Ditching The Word “Feed”
Some ecommerce pros were surprised recently to log in to their Google Merchant Center and see the “Feeds” tabs gone. The disappearance of the word “Feeds” is a sign Google is becoming less reliant on information provided by the brand or merchant to inform its marketing services.
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The New York Times And Instacart Integrate For Shoppable Recipes
The New York Times and Instacart are partnering for shoppable recipe videos.
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Experian Enters The Third-Party Data Onboarding Business
Experian entered the third-party data onboarder market on Tuesday with a new product based on its Tapad acquisition.
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Albertsons Takes Its First Steps Into Non-Endemic Advertising, Retail Media’s Next Frontier
Albertsons is taking that first step into non-endemic advertising next week via a partnership with Rokt to serve ads to people who have already purchased groceries.
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Marketecture Buys AdTechGod (No, Really)
Marketecture has acquired AdTechGod – an anonymous ad tech Twitter poster turned one-man content studio – and the AdTech Forum, an information resource hosted by AdTechGod and Jeremy Bloom.
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Why The False Advertising Lawsuit Against Poppi Is Bad News For RMNs
This week’s dispatch explores the new trend of false advertising class-action suits in the food and CPG industry and how the evolution of online, data-driven retail media could exacerbate the problem.
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Meet The New Media Consultants Thriving Despite Disruption And Macroeconomic Woe
It’s been a tough couple of years for people working in media and marketing, including mass layoffs and uncertainty about the future of ad tech. But while these changes have been difficult for those involved, they’ve also created fertile territory for individual consultants with in-demand expertise.
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Why Regional Grocery Chains Are Buying Into Co-Ops
A growing number of retail media networks are partnering with ad tech intermediaries and each other to manufacture national scale. And you can add regional grocery chains Wegmans and Giant Eagle to that list.
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Forget ROAS? The New Retail Metrics Game
Unfortunately, we seem stuck with our longtime measurement standards, like the trusty old CPM and ROAS. But for change to happen, it must come from within.
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PODCAST: The Big Story‘Incrementality’ Is The Buzzword That Stole Prog IO
Well, that’s a wrap on Programmatic IO Las Vegas 2024! The AdExchanger editorial hopped on stage for a live recording of The Big Story to round up all the moments that made us go “a-ha” this week, including observations on commerce media, CTV and generative AI.
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Paramount And Shopsense Add Programmatic Demand To Their Shoppable Ad Network
What if the new storefront is a person sitting on their couch and scrolling their phone?
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksDon’t Call It A Comeback: The Reinvention Of Search Engine Marketing
With the rise of generative AI software and major changes to search platforms in just the past year or two, SEO and SEM tactics are back. Everyone and their mother is trying to figure out how to make search work and what the new world of search marketing even looks like. Enter Navah Hopkins.
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Scott’s Miracle-Gro Is Seeing Green With Retail Media
It’s lawn season – and you know what that means. Scott’s Miracle-Gro commercials, of course. Except this time, spots for Scott’s will be brought to you by The Home Depot’s retail media network.
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Walled Garden Platforms Are Drowning Marketers In Self-Attributed Sales
Sales are way up; ROAS is through the roof across search, social and ecommerce. At least, that’s what the ad platforms say.
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Expedia Has Booked Its Trip To Ad Land
Expedia Group, the online travel agency giant, is here for the retail media revolution.
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Adalytics Claims Colossus SSP Is Misdeclaring IDs In Its Bid Requests
Colossus SSP, a DEI-focused supply-side platform owned by Direct Digital Holdings (DDH), is the subject of Adalytics’ latest report released Friday. It’s a doozy.
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The Trade Desk Reframes Its Open Internet Vision As ‘The Premium Internet’
The Trade Desk is focusing beyond the overall “open internet” and on what CEO Jeff Green calls the “premium internet.”
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Why Ad Tech Is The New Change Management For Retailers
This week, the AdExchanger Commerce newsletter caught up with Mark Heitke, Best Buy Ads vet and new VP of strategy at Symbiosys, a retail media tech biz with a new take on search advertising.
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Google Search’s Core Updates Are Crushing Sites And Reshaping The Web
Google Search, the web’s largest traffic and revenue generator for two decades, is in the midst of sweeping overhauls that have already altered how users are funneled around the internet.