BrightRoll Blog

By Tod Sacerdoti

Februray 28, 2010

As Peter Drucker once wrote, “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it and exploits it as an opportunity.” Put more simply, change is good . . . of course, that’s unless you’re trying to raise capital in these trying times.

After my company BrightRoll recently closed its Series B round of financing, we took a step back to digest the lessons we learned from pitching and negotiating with a handful of VCs over our 6-week fundraising effort.

To say raising money in the current economic environment has been different than it was two years ago is a massive understatement. Saying it’s night and day would be more accurate. As a year that was touched off by Sequoia’s now famous “RIP Good Times” presentation, 2009 was highlighted by massive layoffs, significant cost cutting and many well publicized company failures. As a result, many VC firms, and their portfolios, are now fraught with uncertainty—walking a fine line between licking their wounds thanks to poor fund returns and looking for new opportunities to improve their fortunes as the market recovers.

To read the rest of the post, visit TechCrunch

By Lewis Rothkopf

February 23, 2010

I’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.

It is, of course, easier and less expensive (in the upfront) to repurpose a 30-second TV spot, but that golden opportunity to talk to your target customers where they live is unfortunately lost.

So what are the options? 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?

To read the rest of the post, visit MediaPost

We recently announced that we are larger than Hulu in video viewership as measured by Quantcast. This is an important milestone for the company and for the online video advertising business.

Here is the raw data:

Here is why this is important:

1. We Only Serve Video Ads. Hulu Serves Video Content And Ads. Yes, we are comparing apples and oranges — if you compared our reach to the reach of Hulu’s ads, there would be a much larger difference between our two networks. Agencies and advertisers often forget that the reach of a site is irrelevant, the only metric that matters to them is the reach of the site’s available ad inventory. As the gap between our network and Hulu continues to grow, it will become more and more clear that the most efficient way to reach targeted video audiences at scale are through video advertising networks.

2. TV Everywhere? More like Video Ads Everywhere. Although there has been a lot of press recently about TV Everywhere, the reality is that online video advertising will be far larger than online television. Why? Because online video advertising is being used by premium publishers to monetize all free content — including broadcast video, short form video, games, radio, social apps — and many of those publishers have much more reach outside of their video content area than within it. Plus, many premium publishers don’t have huge production costs outside of their broadcast content, so advertisers are flocking to more cost efficient placements.

3. By The End of 2010, The Majority of the Top Ten Video Properties Will Be Networks. As I recently predicted in MediaPost, this is beginning of what will be a long trend of networks and aggregators surpassing the largest video properties in total reach. By the end of 2010, the majority of the top 10 video properties (as measured by Quantcast, comScore or your preferred third party) will be video companies that don’t produce any meaningful amount of video content. This means the top 10 properties will be dominated by video ad networks (BrightRoll), video-sharing sites (YouTube), video syndicators (Grab Networks) and vertical video sites (Break.com). Yes, some of these players produce some content, but the vast majority of the views on their properties are generated from content they did not produce.

We look forward to continuing to lead the industry and driving innovations across our platform, pricing, targeting and research initiatives. If you share our passion about video advertising, please reach out or join our team.