James Hercher, Author at Chief Marketer

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 (MMM) tools that many marketers don’t even realize they’re using. MMM is a method for measuring the relative performance of different marketing channels. It fell out of favor because it takes a long time and […]

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Marketers

Adobe Advertising Just Launched Its Own Custom Algorithms Product

Adobe paid $540 million to buy video DSP TubeMogul in 2016 with plans to build a programmatic advertising powerhouse inside one of the world’s largest marketing clouds. But that promise has gone largely unfulfilled during the 10 years since. Until now, perhaps. Last week, Adobe Advertising announced the general release of its own Custom Algorithms […]

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Marketers

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 (which are the central satellite bodies that carry a payload or instruments, not something that, like, shuttles satellites out to a launch pad). But he’s always had a taste for online […]

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Marketers

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 and perhaps even check your presence in the room using a front-facing camera. But at least the hardware is cheap! That’s the promise. Some companies, like the TV manufacturing startup Telly, take it to the logical extreme by offering free televisions in exchange […]

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Marketers

Shopify Wades Deeper Into Advertising, But Not Ad Tech

Shopify is slowly but surely making its way into the ads business. An earlier step in that journey was the hiring of Samir Pradhan as VP of product for merchant marketing in November 2025. There is no product called “Merchant Marketing,” as Pradhan told AdExchanger. But merchant marketing is the way the company thinks about […]

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The Big Story

Mergers And Operating Systems Are Reshaping TV Ads

Linear TV is grabbing attention once again. This time as the broadcast and streaming media worlds are being tied together by major M&A deals. There’s the recent news of Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku and Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery (will it be PWBD? Or another rebrand? TV Land waits on tenterhooks), which […]

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Marketers

The Trade Desk Forms A Travel And Hospitality Media Network

It’s a bird; it’s a plane; it’s a network of travel media networks. On Wednesday, 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. (That’s how it’s branded, and Marriott refers to it as “Riot Media.”) […]

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Marketers

Hyundai Tests Containerized Ad Tech To Drive New Efficiency

There is a potentially seismic shift happening underneath programmatic exchanges, as more ad bidders experiment with placing their AI models or decision-making algorithms in cloud-based container tech that lets those decisions happen at the SSP. Using an SSP’s container means the advertiser gets to observe and bid on a far greater amount of total SSP […]

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Marketers

Independent Ad Tech Is Reframing Itself Around Cloud Hardware

Wait a minute, there’s a programmatic hardware race going on right now? You heard that right. The rapid development and adoption of cloud-based tech have led to new splits in how third-party programmatic vendors position themselves in the market. The positioning essentially comes down to owning one’s own cloud infrastructure or renting bandwidth and cloud […]

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Marketers

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. Over the course of just a few days last week, news emerged that Prebid President Mike Racic and Christian Janelli, Prebid’s director of product management, […]

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