The online advertising industry is continually discussing where video is going and what opportunities exist for it. Which prompts me to ask: If you were given $1 million for an online video business, how would you spend it? What type of entity would you create to turn that $1 million into $100 million? I don't think there is a single silver bullet, but if I was in a position to take this challenge, a few ideas come to mind.

Much is made of the disparity between the share of a user's attention that is directed online and the share of brand dollars that are spent on the Internet. This disconnect results from myriad factors, and the indictments of out-of-touch agencies that need to "get with it" or face extinction are numerous, but the finger rarely points back at the Internet. The fact of the matter is, even if advertisers doubled their online spend this year, there would be no way to absorb that influx of capital accountably. Today, the solutions available to advertisers online simply do not allow marketers …

Cave Paintings. 19th Century Newsies. Massive highway billboards. What do these things share in common? In their own time, they were the most advanced and sophisticated way to advertise a company's message. Write it down, shout it out, and slap it up -- whatever it took to reach the Average Joe as he went about his life with his car keys in one pocket and some loose change in the other. But today's times call for today's methods, and that means Web video.

The nearly four-month writers' strike appears to be coming to an end, and not a minute too soon. The union leadership has given its consent, with membership set to vote on the deal in the coming week. As negotiations come to a close, I wonder: Who won, and most importantly, where do we go from here?

Recently, over a glass of bourbon with an online publisher, a question was raised that I found quite intriguing: Is an analog impression the same as a digital impression? Obviously, my first reaction was "But of course." After all, an impression is an impression, isn't it? "Well, consider," said the online publisher, "on my site, I can tell you how much time a viewer spends with a commercial message. True, the advertiser might be buying a 30-second impression, but what if the viewer only watches five of those 30 seconds?"

The manner in which people watch news is clearly undergoing transformation. Broadcast television news viewers certainly have alternatives -- and Internet-based news programming may also provide more immediate access to news instead of waiting for that news to be prioritized (if appear at all) over "normal" broadcasting airwaves.

If pre-roll was a political candidate, now would be a good time for it to cry. If ever an ad format was in need of some sympathy, this would be it. Time and again pundits and industry speakers preface their comments with "pre-roll is dead." Well, if pre-roll is dead, I'm a monkey's uncle (no emails, please, I get enough grief as is). As someone on the front lines, trust me when I tell you there are more pre-roll ads being developed, more streamed content being monetized by pre-roll, and more planning for pre-roll campaigns than ever.