Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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How Advertisers Can – And Cannot – Get In Front Of Chatbot Shoppers
If a brand wants to improve its search visibility, there are all sorts of well-understood mechanisms – paid, organic and earned – to do so. But for a brand marketer whose CEO says, “We need to appear in these customer journey recommendation engines, and we’re willing to pay for it,” what can they do?
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Northbeam Adds The Third Leg Of The Attribution Stool With Incrementality Testing
There’s MMM and MTA, but no single ad measurement works for brands with multiple points of sale. On Tuesday, Northbeam launched an incrementality tool to complete what it calls “the trifecta of digital attribution.”
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Archer Goes Brand Building To Protect Its Place On Grocery Shelves
I’m keenly interested by emerging grocery aisle trends, snacks especially. So, I was quick to grab an interview with Andrew Thomas, head of marketing for the meat snack brand Archer, who was being offered to speak to a case study with GumGum regarding CTV pause ads.
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The Sports World Is Getting The Retail Media Bug
The retail media revolution of data-driven, digital marketing monetization is coming to the sports industry.
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Carl’s Jr. And Hardee’s Marketing Goes Regional With Amazon Ads’ Streaming Media
The age-old question for streaming TV advertisers is, how to target the viewers they want while reaching the scale their businesses need. The quick-serve restaurant operator CKE, which owns Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, sought an answer in a case study with Attain and Amazon Ads.
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The Rise Of Principal Media And The End Of The Agencies As We Knew Them
Ad agency holding companies are among the most adaptable businesses out there. In recent years holdcos like Publicis, WPP and Omnicom-IPG have stretched our notions of what an agency business even is exactly.
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MyFitnessPal Wants To Start The Health And Wellness Subsector Of Retail Media
MyFitnessPal has just announced the launch of a data-driven advertising business that draws on its wealth of user-provided meal planning, fitness and nutrition data.
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Viant Had A Good Q4, But Still Needs To Punch Up At Bigger Platforms
Viant reported its Q4 and full-year 2025 earnings on Wednesday evening and investors appeared pleased.
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YouTube Americas Leader Tara Walpert Levy Says Measurement Proves Creators Do TV Ads Best
“We are focused on being where the world watches video,” said Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s VP, Americas at the Convergent TV conference in NYC on Thursday. “And to us that now is TV.”
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Sallie Has An Ad Business And Meta Is Declining Credit Cards
Sallie, the major issuer of US education loans, is getting into the retail media network business.
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Meta Has A New Way To Measure Social Engagement (Because Clicks Don’t Cut It)
Meta will now measure social interactions like likes, shares and comments under a new “engage-through attribution” category, replacing click-through as the default.
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The Trade Desk Welcomes OpenTTD, The Partner Integration Portal To Rule Them All
The Trade Desk has OpenPath, OpenAds, OpenSincera and, as of today, a new platform portal called OpenTTD.
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The Trade Desk Faces Headwinds As Investors Reconsider The Thesis Of Objective Indie Ad Tech
The Trade Desk, once a Wall Street darling, now faces the challenge of rebuilding goodwill across the investor community and the ad tech industry.
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Infillion Strikes Again, This Time Buying The Retail Purchase Data Company Catalina
Infillion, an ad tech business built on M&A, is back with another acquisition. This time it’s Catalina, a century-old market research and shopper marketing company with roots in physical cash register machines.
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Walmart’s Ad Revenue Totaled $6.4 Billion In 2025 As The Ecommerce Flywheel Started To Spin
“Fully a third of our profit in the most recent quarter was related to advertising and membership income,” Walmart CFO John David Rainey told investors on Thursday.
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Big CPG Brands Are Quick To Cut Ad Spend Amid A Tough US Market
Companies like P&G, PepsiCo and Colgate-Palmolive are cutting marketing spend as the easiest and quickest way to protect profitability.