While the World Cup is still two weeks from kick-off, brands have been battling online with tournament-themed advertising for a while now. In fact, they started releasing campaigns in November -- eight months before the first game would be played.

At the NewFronts earlier this May, we saw many media companies show off their best new online video offerings. The media industry knows that consumers have an insatiable appetite for video content, and the original programming that's being introduced will no doubt feed the video consumption frenzy. Some, but certainly not all, of the new video content produced following the NewFronts will be available not only online, but also via OTT (over-the-top), platforms such as Roku.

This month I attended the IAB's joint digital video and mobile committees meeting, where the agenda was mobile video. This is an important topic in our multiplatform world: How will advertising previously confined to lengthy pods within long-form content distributed by broadcast, cable and satellite on larger home television screens, work in a mobile, multiscreen, variable-length content environment distributed through cellular networks and WiFi?

More video viewing drives more TV viewing. That's the finding of a Viacom study on TV Everywhere revealing that consumers who use the apps and authenticated viewing options watch more programming in general, and they also have more warm fuzzies toward their pay TV operators.

One technology often overlooked in today's collective ad tech conversation is the skippable video ad. Much like the concept of permission marketing advanced by Seth Godin and others, skippable video ads constitute what amounts to permission advertising.

This week, Coca-Cola released a new campaign, "This is AHH." In a first for the brand, the spots are solely comprised of user-generated content. Creating ads from footage take by consumers is not a new idea. But Coke's reliance on user-generated content for a television campaign targeted at teens seems to signal a lot about this younger generation and what brands will have to do to engage it in the future.

Remember when this year was the year of interactive TV? And then the next year was, and the next, and the next? Well, it's taken a decade, maybe more, to finally reach the year of interactive TV, and the manifestation of it sure isn't what the pundits prognosticated. Forget playing along with a game on TV, or clicking on Jennifer Aniston's sweater. Interactive TV is simple, and it can scale to pretty much everyone because pretty much everyone has a cell phone. That's how interactive TV is finally playing out.

Advertisers and publishers alike are embracing the concept of multiplatform video campaigns, and both face a major industry challenge: unified reporting across these myriad screens. When a single video piece runs across multiple digital platforms such as online, mobile, YouTube, Roku, Apple TV and out-of-home (movie theaters, stadiums), the post-play reporting is not one but many, with different methodologies and measurement metrics. Advertisers and publishers are forced to scotch-tape or glue them into one usable report.

I came away from the Digital Content NewFronts thinking that digital media publishers believe wholly in video, but that in an ever-increasing way they are both creating it and presenting it like television content. And of course they are trying to sell it like television content. Don't get me wrong: I love all of this new content, the inherent competitive and symbiotic relationship with digital publishers and TV, and the data that informs content and provides insights to consumer behaviors. But the more the conversation is framed as a shift in ad dollars, the more we perpetuate the notion of …

For Facebook to be a serious player in video advertising, media buyers need more insight into how its videos perform. The current analytics are, in a word, subpar. They lack the information that YouTube videos and other online video properties have provided for years. The current metrics do not differentiate between paid and organic views, nor do they break down demographics for the plays or time spent on each video. There isn't even a differentiation between auto-play views and click views. But Facebook has finally made the announcement that some of these basics will be included in its metrics in …