Lewis Rothkopf

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• Publishers: Declare Your Independence From Old Monetization in Publishers Daily on 07/01/2016
  

  Ad blocking. Decreasing CPMs. User fatigue. Slow page loads. The current state of digital monetization has left publishers, content owners and app developers wondering where to turn.

• Taking The 'Hype' Out Of Hypertargeting in Publishing Insider on 11/20/2012
  

  For the past several years, I've been fortunate enough to take part in the "Hypertargeting" panel at Digital Hollywood. The session is always well-attended and generates a wide array of perspectives. Even though technology to identify, optimize and deliver to appropriate audiences is constantly improving, the fundamentals have remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. In our panel last Friday, I aimed to provoke discussion about the ways marketers and publishers can leverage smart targeting to obtain a better result.

• How Can I Run Ads On Connected TV When I Can't Figure Out How To Program My VCR? in Video Insider on 09/22/2011
  

  Remember the 1980s meme about how hard it is to program a VCR? So insidious was this apparent difficulty that a system was developed to abstract out the whole "start, end, channel" business: a "Plus Code" was assigned to each show and published in programming guides. One simply entered the corresponding code into his VCR and boom, done.

  All that work, just so that consumers could watch what they wanted, when they wanted to.

  More than two decades later, people still grapple with the same core problem -- is the content I want to watch available? Is it free? How long do I have to wait after it airs on broadcast to watch it online?

• Video Forecast: Sky's The Limit? in Video Insider on 05/23/2011
  

  I'm often asked to offer predictions about what the online video landscape will look like several years from now, which I always respectfully decline to do. Our industry is so dynamic, with new players emerging daily, it's relatively impossible to offer meaningful forecasts more than 12-18 months away. However, a smart colleague recently challenged me to use this space to do just that, in light of the increasing ubiquity of video across multiple devices and the resulting fragmentation of audiences. Perhaps the time is now right to look at the progress we've made as an industry over the last six or seven years and put a stake in the ground for 2013.

• Shedding Light On The Value Of The Video Exchange  in Video Insider on 03/03/2011
  

  Recently, Jason Burke wrote a piece entitled "The Limitations of Video Ad Exchanges," where he discussed the benefits and challenges inherent to buying and selling in a bidded marketplace. A knotty topic, indeed; a commenter responding to Jason's piece asked, "How is buying from video exchange... [different] than display exchange buying? Challenges in one that [don't] exist in the other?" Great questions!

• Keeping Video Growing: Our Shared Responsibility in Video Insider on 10/25/2010
  

  The Wall Street Journal recently reported that "in the first six months of 2010, advertisers spent $627 million on video ads," a significant increase from the year-ago period. This statistic makes it clear that online video's combination of sight, sound and motion is an especially effective one for advertisers, something that comes as no surprise to broadcast veterans. The addition of interactive capabilities further enhances the user experience and increases advertiser benefit. But in order to maintain this pace of growth, each of the stakeholders involved need to rally around maintaining advertiser value. For the ecosystem to thrive, all parties need to ask themselves: "Am I delivering on the marketer's goals?"

• Make Us Compete For Your Business -- One Impression At A Time in Video Insider on 08/04/2010
  

  Videocentric publishers are quickly moving toward a strategy in which multiple ad sources compete for an impression at the time of the ad call, while networks are exposing the amount they're willing to pay for an individual impression within the ad call itself. There's a temptation to call this concept RTB or Real Time Bidding, which I won't, because it's a loaded, polarizing buzzword. RTB connotes exchange, marketplace and platform, all of which are successful and proven models. They aren't, however, intrinsically linked to the concept of per-impression competition, which is all we're talking about here.

• (Non-Obvious) People I Want To Discuss the Video Economy With Over Lunch in Video Insider on 04/26/2010
  

  One of the great privileges I have at BrightRoll is the opportunity to meet with incredibly interesting, talented people in the online video industry all the time. Of course, working in a common field gives us lots to talk about. Many of us in this space, however, have long known that our industry possesses important parallels to other, seemingly unrelated fields. Studying and exploring current trends in these non-adjacent areas offers us the opportunity to learn lessons beyond those our own relatively young industry can teach us. It's with this thought in mind that I respectfully extend an open invitation to the following individuals...

• We'll Do It Live! in Video Insider on 02/22/2010
  

  've spoken at length about both the radical and advantageous ways in which video ads can vary from their television counterparts. While some advertisers are embracing the many benefits our medium offers in the areas of targeting, analysis and interactivity, many still are not. At the most basic level, advertisers can create a digital-specific component as part of their campaign -- and keep it to 15 seconds to achieve the greatest distribution. Interactivity layered on top of the pre-roll is even more interesting. But what if we began to have a true real-time conversation with our consumers -- and do it live?

• New Year's Wishes For Online Video In 2010 in Video Insider on 12/21/2009
  

  As we conclude the year and the decade, I think back to where I was at this point 10 years ago. I was working with publishers at one of the first and greatest display networks, and we were collaborating with our partners and vendors to ensure the Y2K bug wouldn't cause blank 468x60s and 120x90s to appear across the network. Unrealized doomsday fears aside, 1999 was a great time to enter the Internet ad business, and the intervening 10 years have taught me -- and many of us -- a lot about what really matters to the players in our space. When I toast the beginning of 2010 in a few weeks, on behalf of our industry I'll be wishing for the following...

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