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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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.
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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.