Founder Spotlight: Brightroll's Tod Sacerdoti
Brightroll calls itself the world’s largest branded video advertising network, saying that it has served billions of advertisements since it was founded in 2006. Whether that's the truth or hyperbole, one senses that its 32-year-old cofounder, Tod Sacerdoti, knows his stuff when it comes to the world of Internet marketing. Sacerdoti first "caught the bug" covering Internet marketing for Robertson Stephens, straight out of Yale. As he moved through several business development positions, including at venture-backed startups Spoke Software and Plaxo, Sacerdoti maintained Internet marketing side projects, including assembling a portfolio of 1,000 domain names. “I was small time, but I was always involved in lead gen stuff." Then, inspiration struck. Plaxo was helping YouTube create a distribution widget, so people could share videos with their friends (and YouTube could suck up their address books). Sacerdoti, who was involved in the process, says the deal gave him access to data that wasn’t public for a year -- data that pointed to a massive consumption of video online. Six months later, Brightroll was born. Sacerdoti and I talked yesterday about Brightroll’s fast-growing business, along with some of the shadier tricks of the video advertising trade. It's an interview that anyone wanting to better understand the world of online video advertising should read.
