Darren Herman
Marketing, Media, and Technology Conversations
Category: Advertising & Marketing

I meet with plenty of technology companies who sell to marketers and agencies and  I also meet with many marketing and advertising technology startups who are pitching for venture funding.  Sometimes they are one and the same. I’ve been witnessing companies coming thru the door and telling me that they are a pure technology platform, [...]

It was announced yesterday that SocialFlow raised $10MM in Series B funding and our kbs+ Ventures participated along with Fairhaven Capital (lead), Softbank, RRE, AOL Ventures, Betaworks, and Rand Capital.  We blogged about our perspective on why we participated on our corporate blog but I wanted to add a few notes here. I have been [...]

I am a fan of Adobe ($ADBE).  You certainly know this if you’ve been reading this blog.  Here is an article I wrote in 2011 about Adobe’s strategy that has pretty much held true and something we all should re-read. This morning I read the 2013 Investor Presentation (PDF) by Adobe and wanted to highlight [...]

There is $344B in media* market cap that own and operate ad serving systems now.   Google acquired DoubleClick ($274B mkt cap), AOL acquired AdTech ($2.86B mkt cap), and Facebook acquired Atlas ($65.4B mkt cap).  ValueClick owns MOJO and retained Mediaplex ad-server ($2.05B mkt cap). When we think about ad servers for Madison Avenue, our [...]

We had a nice piece written about kbs+ Ventures in the WSJ today that spoke about the evolved model we are bringing to market.  I’m glad the WSJ initially reached out because it’s truly a great story to tell.  You can find the article here. A month or two ago, we also put a short [...]

Quick link:  Download report here. This was our second year releasing the Marketing Technology Holiday E-Commerce report.  It’s no Lumascape, but it’s damn interesting. It started as a simple project for me to understand which top e-commerce players were using different Marketing Technologies.  This year, we included trending information from last year’s report. Here is [...]

I thought I’d put this out to the community since I would love to engage in conversation around this. At the agency, we have recently seen significant positive performance on a FBX campaign; performance as measured by an online sale (lets keep it vague). I have been thinking about this and emailing with a few [...]

I spent some time thinking about Google Fiber and it’s opportunity and threats to the consumer and business ecosystem.  This is not supposed to be a fully thought out piece but rather some raw thinking that I’m putting out to the Interwebs for continuing a conversation that was started by many of you. Why is [...]

Happy Wednesday.  I thought I’d write another post that points to discussions or products that I’ve been part of recently.   Leave some comments below or reach out directly if you’d like to talk further about any of these. It’s amazing how much an interface can make or break a product, go Alto!.   In early [...]

Back when I was blogging more often, I used to write posts that provided perspective on other industry conversations around the web.  I did this fairly frequently in the 2000s but have stepped back a bit over the past couple of years mostly because Ive been balancing the family and work  and blogging has been [...]