James Hercher
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
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James Hercher
Articles By James Hercher
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The Healthcare Marketing Tech Company OptimizeRx Is Going Programmatic
OptimizeRx, which has software that plugs into the systems doctors use to prescribe drugs and maintain patient records, has taken its next big step into the world of programmatic through a new partnership with The Trade Desk.
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Apple Publishes Its Plan To Wipe Out Web Tracking
Apple is coming for identity resolution. WebKit’s latest tracking crackdown targets the infrastructure behind post-cookie IDs – and switching to a first-party setup won’t necessarily spare vendors.
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How Australian Home Lender Lendi Measures The Invisible Work Of AI
Most brands and businesses are trying to figure out how to improve their metrics when it comes to AI – and also what those metrics even are.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingSure, Debates Between Prebid Members Can Get Heated. That’s Why It’s The Programmatic Melting Pot
The Prebid Summit in New York City on Tuesday exceeded the event’s reputation for liveliness.
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OPINION: Data-Driven ThinkingHas The Ad Industry Lost The Pulse Of American Consumers?
The ad industry has become a community of people who say things like “This is going to sound relatable” and follow it up with a sentence that may as well be Martian to 99% of America.
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How Data And Ad Tech Vendors Are Preparing For The iOS 27 Fallout
Against the backdrop of Advertising Week New York this week, the programmatic ecosystem has been buzzing madly like the inhabitants of an overturned beehive after the release of Apple’s iOS 27.
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Apple Has Far-Reaching Plans To Block Hundreds Of Programmatic Data Companies From iOS
Apple’s WebKit crackdown appears to extend well beyond The Trade Desk, putting hundreds of ad tech, data and identity vendors on a mysterious, dynamically updated block list.
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Instead Of AI Insights Replacing Ad Measurement, Think Of Attribution As Running Your AI
“When I talk to advertisers, they want a level of insight and transparency that helps them still have important levels of control,” says Paula Despins, VP of measurement for Amazon Ads, Amazon Marketing Cloud and ads trust.
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Apple’s Latest Operating System Blocks The Trade Desk From Serving Ads On Safari
The Trade Desk is unable to serve ads to the Safari browser for Apple device owners that have downloaded iOS 27. Apple has been investigating the issue since last week.
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Amazon Ads And The Amazon DSP Get An Agentic Rebrand
Amazon Ads has overhauled its DSP and the sponsored product and search-based ad console for on-platform ads, the company announced at its unBoxed event in San Francisco on Tuesday.
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Amazon Gets Conversational With New Agentic Ad Formats And Brand Controls
The agentification of Amazon Ads is underway. At its unBoxed ads industry event in San Francisco on Tuesday, Amazon announced a major ad tech overhaul, with its DSP turning into a default agentic chatbot experience.
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Who Will Stand Up For The Open Web?
The open web is done, stick a fork in it. Banner blindness is near universal, search traffic has run dry and publishers are struggling for oxygen. But what if that’s … not true?
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HBO MAX’s Reddit Account Was Compromised And Used For Ad Fraud
A week ago, HBO MAX had its verified Reddit account overrun by a hacker group, which eluded notice for two days while it ran 108 different ad permutations targeting an unknown number of Redditors.
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Sam’s Club Debuts Ad Targeting Products That Confidently Assert Future Buyers
Walmart-owned Sam’s Club has a new AI-powered pitch for brands: Target the next purchase, not the last one.
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Why Wall Street Turned Against The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk is less than a third as valuable as it was a year ago. It retains about one-tenth of its high-water market cap from December 2024, when the company was worth almost $70 billion. Why did investors lose the faith?
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How The Fin Tech Clearco Finances Ecommerce Startups (Without Losing Its Shirt)
This week, the Commerce Media Newsletter catches up with a startup from outside the world of data-driven advertising, but with an interesting position when it comes to ecommerce advertising. That’s Clearco, a Canadian fin tech company founded in 2015.
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The Largest Shopping Mall Operator Has Its Own Retail Media Network
Simon Property Group, the largest shopping mall operator in the world, is taking its biggest step yet into the world of data-driven advertising. On Thursday, the company launched Simon Media Network, its version of a retail media network.
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Micro1 Wants Human Domain Experts To Profit From AI And LLMs
Much like the ecosystem of life that surrounds a blue whale, a market of AI SaaS vendors is springing up around the biggest AI companies. And AI data startup Micro1 is emblematic of the shifting nature of these early-stage AI vendors.
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Taking A Look At Tuple, A New Entrant To The Ossified DSP Market
Tuple is entering the DSP market at a strange and tense moment for third-party ad tech. “There’s just so much animosity” between the programmatic buy and sell sides, says Founder and CEO Doug Lauretano.
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AppLovin Wants To Persuade The World That Its Ad Platform Is The Real Deal
Two years ago, AppLovin launched an ecommerce beta program to bring in non-gaming advertisers. Now it’s launched a consumer ads segment with ambitions to take on the Big Tech platforms.
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The Trade Desk’s Revenue Growth Stalls As Big Brands Tighten Their Belts
“Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to,” The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green told investors.
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AppLovin Asks For Patience As It Grows Its Ecommerce And Consumer Ads Business
“We’re deemed a new bucket, so a testing category,” AppLovin CEO told investors regarding its nascent consumer and ecommerce ads business. “And to graduate up takes time. This stuff compounds over quarters and years.”
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For Cuisinart, AI-Generated Ads Are As Handy As A Kitchen Blender
Cuisinart’s marketing team has been eager to take advantage of generative AI-based creative.
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Amazon Crushes Earnings And Reaches Almost $20 Billion In Q2 Ad Revenue
Amazon’s advertising businesses earned a total $19.8 billion in Q2, the company reported in its quarterly earnings on Thursday. That’s up from $15.7 billion in Q2 2025, and good for a 26% year over year growth rate.
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Omnicom Investors Cheer IPG Sell-Off, Despite Weak Ad Spend In Q2
Omnicom is halfway through a major sell-off of IPG agencies. Its future looks healthier as it prunes lower-growth firms, including eliminating certain specialist firms and overlapping agencies in certain countries.
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Why PubMatic Ditched Its Prebid Web Wrapper, But Never Its SDK
Earlier this month, PubMatic shelved its Prebid integration wrapper, known as OpenWrap Web, and announced it would begin recommending Playwire as an offloading-onboarding partner for the 250-odd publishers that use its wrapper.
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Alphabet Smashes Ad Revenue Earnings Again – But Does It Still Care About Ads?
Investors didn’t bring up Google’s advertising business or ads in general once during the Q&A portion of Alphabet’s earnings report call on Wednesday.
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Sellers Are Fed Up With Amazon, But Can They Force Change?
Million Dollar Sellers, or “MDS,” is a group of Amazon sellers and specialists. And they’ve had it with Amazon’s advertiser and seller squeeze. But can they do anything about it?
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Google’s Meridian And Meta’s Robyn: A Gift To Measurement Or Trojan Horses?
Google and Meta are quietly rewriting the rules of ad measurement, and they’re doing it with open-source marketing mix modeling tools that many marketers don’t even realize they’re using.
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Adobe Advertising Just Launched Its Own Custom Algorithms Product
Last week, Adobe Advertising announced the general release of its own Custom Algorithms product, which is “a huge departure from the TubeMogul days,” Erwin Castellanos, GM of Adobe Advertising, tells AdExchanger.