James Hercher

It’s a little less sunny in California these days – at least as far as The Trade Desk is concerned. The Ventura-based independent DSP is less than a third as valuable as it was a year ago. It retains about one-tenth of its high-water market cap from December 2024, when the company was worth almost […]

This week, I caught 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, which, earlier this month, raised a $100 million in financing from the bank Macquarie Group. The digital-native ecommerce brand […]

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. Simon isn’t a total newcomer to advertising, said CRO Jared Blechman, who joined the company this year […]

Doug Lauretano began his advertising career in the early noughts on the publisher side at titles such as Fortune, The Wall Street Journal and CNN Money. He spent a decade at supply-side programmatic players OpenX and Media.net before joining data and advertising company CivicScience in 2021. It was at CivicScience while developing a deal ID […]

The Trade Desk generated $715 million in Q2, up by only 3% year-over-year. Shares dropped by more than 20% in after-hours trading immediately after TTD reported its results on Thursday. “Our revenue growth is below our expectations and below the standard we hold ourselves to,” CEO Jeff Green told investors. Although he also cautioned that […]

AppLovin made $1.9 billion in Q2, almost $1.3 billion of which was recorded as net income, the company reported in its quarterly earnings on Wednesday. Both the total revenue and profitability metrics were up by more than 50% compared to the same time last year. That sounds impressive. However, AppLovin shares fell by more than […]

Amazon’s advertising businesses earned a total of $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. While those revenue numbers would be reason to celebrate for any other advertising business, they barely registered for Amazon. […]

Omnicom’s advertising revenue suffered in the second quarter. But that didn’t stop the holding company’s stock from jumping to a one-year high on Wednesday morning, as investors digested its plan to sell off parts of IPG and absorb IPG. Total revenue in Q2 was $6.6 billion, roughly flat compared to Omnicom and IPG’s combined revenue […]

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. The news made nary a ripple, and relatively little revenue hangs in the balance. But PubMatic’s decision to hand off its Prebid wrapper […]

The second quarter was what you might call an interesting one for Alphabet – especially if you care about advertising. Google’s Network advertising business, which constitutes ad spend across the open web, was down year over year once again. Meanwhile, in early July, Google lost a years-long appeal against a record 4.1 billion euro antitrust […]