Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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Liquid I.V. Sponsors A Formula 1 Race As DTC Brands Compete For Sports Fans
Digital-native brands are racing to break free of their social media roots to reach a broader base of US customers. For many brands, this means betting big on sports.
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Criteo Splits Out Retail Media Revenue For The First Time
Criteo split out its retail media segment revenue for the first time during its earnings report on Thursday.
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How Shopify Learned To Love Advertising
This week, the AdExchanger Commerce Newsletter catches up with Shopify, which, in the past couple of years, quietly became one of the most important players in online advertising, despite rarely being thought of in the category.
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Google’s Ad Network Biz Dips, But Search Brings Home The Bacon
By next year, Google will have three separate business lines – Search, YouTube and Cloud – with an annual run rate to generate at least $100 billion, CEO Sundar Pichai told investors.
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Ibotta Crosses The IPO Finish Line – Now The Real Work Begins
Ibotta’s evolution since it was founded 13 years ago – it went public last week – is emblematic of the industry’s overall transition from third-party data marketplaces to first-party and retail media data.
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How Chinese Sellers Are Quietly Reshaping US Consumer Habits
American consumers are buying more and more online products directly from Chinese manufacturers. It’s an important change, though many online shoppers are unaware.
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Why White Claw’s Parent Company Is Pouring Investment Into Headless Commerce
A booze brand and a “headless commerce” platform walk into a meeting with the CFO. That might sound like the setup for a punchline, but it’s just how mar tech works these days.
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As MMM Rides Again, Google Finds Its Place In The Conversation With Meridian
Tracking is a mess. Attribution is broken beyond repair. IP address identity data may go the way of the dodo. Which means marketing mix modeling is back, baby!
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PODCAST: AdExchanger TalksA New Day For Targeting And Analytics
Jeromy Sonne began bootstrapping his ad optimization and analytics startup Daypart.AI in 2023, having missed the heady days of low interest rates. Still, there’s gold in them thar hills for a programmatic startup that isn’t exactly a DSP, isn’t built on cookie-based data and is native to cloud-based advertising.