Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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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.
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Hasbro And Animaj Form A New YouTube Ad Sales House For Kids And Family Content
The kids companies Hasbro and Animaj have formed a co-venture for selling their ads on YouTube and streaming media.
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AppLovin Takes On Haters And Doubters As It Lays Out Its Ecommerce Ad Ambitions
AppLovin’s profits and revenue are skyrocketing—but investors aren’t buying the story, sending shares tumbling 20%.
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Criteo Says It's Bullish On The Future, But The Market’s All Bears
Criteo has an optimistic pitch for future growth, but Wall Street doesn’t see the money yet from LLMs, commerce agents and social shopping.
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Wizard Commerce Launches An AI Shopping Agent To Make Magic of Ecommerce Madness
What people need is an independent agent that peers across retailer and is entirely focused on ecommerce services. At least that’s the conclusion driving Wizard Commerce, a personal shopping agent that emerged from beta on Wednesday.
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LiveRamp’s Q4 Earnings Defy Wall Street’s SaaS Skeptics
An emerging consensus among Wall Street investors, based on the earnings reports of companies like Meta and Alphabet, is that subscription software is on the way out. LiveRamp, which reported its Q4 earnings on Thursday, is staring straight down the barrel of this conventional wisdom.
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Alphabet Can Outgrow Everything Else, But Can It Outgrow Ads?
Describing Google’s revenue growth has become a problem, it so vastly outpaces the human capacity to understand large numbers and percentage growth rates. The company earned more than $113 billion in Q4 2025, and more than $400 billion in the past year.
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The IAB Formalizes Its Measurement Initiatives Under Its New ‘Project Eidos’
The IAB unveiled its Project Eidos on Monday, a new program uniting its numerous measurement initiatives under one banner.
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Microsoft To Stop Caching Prebid Video Files, Leaving Publishers With A Major Ad Serving Problem
Most publishers have no idea that a major part of their video ad delivery will stop working on April 30, shortly after Microsoft shuts down the Xandr DSP.
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Hershey’s Undergoes A Brand Update As It Rethinks Paid, Earned And Owned Media
This Wednesday marks the beginning of Hershey’s first major brand marketing campaign since 2018
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Getting Lost In The Protocols At NRF’s Big Show 2026
Retail’s Big Show, the annual NRF event in New York City, was big on agentic commerce, unsurprisingly, as well as influencer and creator marketing, which was an eye-opener.
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New Startup Pinch AI Tackles The Growing Problem Of Ecommerce Return Scams
Fraud is eating into retail profits. A new startup called Pinch AI just launched with $5 million in funding to fight back.
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CPG Data Seller SPINS Moves Into Media With MikMak Acquisition
On Wednesday, retail and CPG data company SPINS added a new piece with its acquisition of MikMak, a click-to-buy ad tech and analytics startup that helps optimize their commerce media.