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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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.
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Kickbacks Takes An Outsider’s View While Bringing Ads To AI Agents
Andrew McCalip is a founding engineer at Varda Space Industries, where he oversees the manufacturing of things like hypersonic reentry vehicles and satellite buses.
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How Tovala Banks On Subscriptions And Incrementality – But Not Ads – To Profit From Its Oven
Smart TVs, refrigerators and other home appliances may pester you with marketing, but at least the hardware is cheap. Another startup taking a different approach to the same theory is Tovala, which was founded in 2015 and combines a standalone countertop oven with a weekly meal kit subscription.
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Shopify Wades Deeper Into Advertising, But Not Ad Tech
Shopify is slowly but surely making its way into the ads business. But the ecommerce leader maintains its laissez-faire approach to ad monetization.
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PODCAST: The Big StoryMergers And Operating Systems Are Reshaping TV Ads
The broadcast and streaming worlds are being pulled together by a wave of major M&A, from Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku to Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. TV Land, naturally, is watching closely.
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The Trade Desk Forms A Travel And Hospitality Media Network
The Trade Desk expanded its relationships with a host of travel, hospitality and mobility-focused commerce media partners, including Uber Advertising, Booking.com, United Airline’s Kinective Media and MARRIOTT MEDIA.
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Hyundai Tests Containerized Ad Tech To Drive New Efficiency
Hyundai was the pilot advertiser between Chalice and OpenX of the SSP’s container product, called OpenXBuild, that launched this year.
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Independent Ad Tech Is Reframing Itself Around Cloud Hardware
Nowadays, programmatic vendors, and SSPs in particular, are carving new paths of differentiation based on their type of adoption of cloud infrastructure.
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Outgoing Prebid President Mike Racic On His Departure And The Org’s Next Act
Prebid is turning the page on what might be called its second chapter as the organization navigates some major changes in the digital advertising landscape and within its own ranks.
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Marketers Have Become Followers Of The Cult Of Performance
Over the past few years, driven primarily by AI adoption, there has been a truly radical change to how quickly and easily brands will abandon old standards of quality – or even decency – in the name of performance.
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Pirated Sports Streams Are Warping TV’s Most Important Ratings
Although tides of ad revenue flow based on the ratings of certain tentpole TV events, a new crop of scammers now operate illicit sports livestreaming rings, and there’s almost nothing broadcasters can do about it.
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Google Wants To Do Your Shopping For You At GML This Year
Agentic shopping is the next big thing. At least that’s the message from Google’s big annual conference for ad product updates.
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Publicis Acquires LiveRamp In A Major Shakeup For Indie Data Collaboration
Hundreds of exasperated and unexpected ad industry phone calls were made on Sunday, as agencies and ad tech vendors discussed the fallout of Publicis Groupe’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp over the weekend.
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Why Albertsons Is Adding The LTV Metric To Its Analytics
“If we only are looking at ROAS, we’re being fairly myopic about how we understand the actual relationship between the retailer and the brand,” says Liz Roche, VP of media and measurement at the grocery chain Albertsons.
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Viant Sees A Growth Wave Coming, But First Marketers Must Really Ditch Walled Garden Ad Tech
Viant’s modest growth story took a backseat to a far louder claim: that fed-up advertisers are finally ready to ditch the rigged economics of Big Tech’s walled gardens.
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Is Agentic Commerce An Oasis Or Mirage?
For companies like Shopify, Criteo and Instacart – and even for giants like Amazon and Walmart – figuring out if the agentic oasis is real or a mirage is their priority No. 1.
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The Trade Desk Has A Grand Vision, But Needs A New Breed Of CMO To Make It A Reality
TTD CEO Jeff Green laid out the DSP’s plan for winning in a new world of advertising that – AI aside – necessitates major changes in how marketers behave.
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Criteo Faces Tough Headwinds Until Agentic AI Ad Revenue Materializes
Criteo shares dropped by 20% Wednesday morning after the company reported shaky Q1 earnings and revised its guidance downward for the rest of the year.
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Upfronts Advertisers Say They Want Outcomes – And Amazon Licks Its Chops
Amazon has packaged a handful of upgrades to its ads measurement solutions, obviously catered to TV and streaming media advertisers.
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What An Outdoor Retailer Learned By Replacing Pricey SaaS With A Newcomer
I find it useful on occasion to interview people who are marketing-adjacent, and thus possess a different and perhaps more highly clarified perspective on the tools we use for data-driven online advertising. One such recent briefing was with Joe Torreano, VP of product and UX for outdoorsy gear and clothing online retailer Backcountry.
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Google Touts Its AI Ad Tech Adoption And New AI Max Features
Google announced new features and ad types for AI Max, its AI-based bidding product for search and shopping or sponsored product ads. The company also touted “hundreds of thousands” of advertisers using AI Max.
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Alphabet Exceeds $100 Billion In Q1 And Its Profits Almost Doubled
Alphabet earned $109.9 billion in Q1 this year, up from $90.2 billion a year ago. And that’s not even the truly gobsmacking number.
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Rakuten And Impact.com Forge A New Alliance That Resets The Affiliate Industry
The two longest-standing names in the affiliate and partnership marketing category, Rakuten and Impact.com, have decided to stop fighting each other and will instead fight together.
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The Trade Desk Makes Its DSP Available Within Skai And Pacvue
The Trade Desk announced that it will begin allowing mutual clients to use its DSP within the Pacvue or Skai platforms.
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Even PayPal Ads Has Its Own ID Now
If you thought programmatic didn’t have room for yet another advertising ID graph, then you’d be wrong. On Monday, PayPal launched the PayPal Ads ID, a new identity product tied to PayPal and Venmo’s customer base.
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Amazon Faces An Easy Boycott But An Existential Question
The Amazon advertising boycott last week wasn’t really about Amazon’s ad platform as much as it was a dispute over evolving seller economics, which raises a fundamental question: Can you even build a brand on Amazon anymore?
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Hard Truths For Retail Media At The IAB Connected Commerce Summit
The IAB’s Connected Commerce event in New York City this week felt to me like the retail media industry’s first sit-down explanation to a child who is now a “big kid” and must act accordingly.
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For Google Advertisers Who Overpaid The Monopoly – Don’t Hate, Arbitrate
Law firm Keller Postman is leading mass arbitration suits against Google, seeking advertiser damages for alleged monopoly overpricing. The total available pot is a quarter-trillion dollars.