We are very excited to announce that Scot McLernon has joined our team as Chief Revenue Officer.  Scot has an amazing sales background, with over 15 years in the interactive media and advertising industry.  McLernon built and led three successful web advertising sales teams, including at CBS MarketWatch, which was recognized by Forrester for highest revenue per sales person for four years in a row.  While under his leadership, CBS MarketWatch won “best business and finance site to advertise with” and his sales teams earned the acclaimed ASPY award as Best Overall Sales Team on the web.  Most recently Scot was President of Upstream Group, where he developed Habitat - the industry’s only combined training and networking event for sellers.

“Scot is an undisputed leader in online ad sales,” said YuMe CEO Michael Mathieu.  “Having a person of Scot’s caliber join our team is a validation of YuMe’s strong position in the market and a huge boost to our team overall.  Scot’s experience in driving sales and scaling business will help grow YuMe’s online video monetization efforts, strategy and value proposition.”

McLernon was on the Board of Directors for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for five years and co-founded the Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) in 2004, which educates and helps network the Bay Area’s interactive marketing community.  Recognizing Scot’s accomplishments as an innovator and industry pioneer, he received the ad:tech Industry Achievement Award in 2007.

Check out MediaPost’s coverage of the announcement.

- Molly Glover Gallatin

TV viewers are headed to the Web more often than before. And as video segments being offered over the Internet start to resemble TV programming more often – in the form of webisodes – some are asking whether viewers will actually go back to the traditional set, especially now that the writers are striking and popular shows will likely turn to reruns to fill their time slots.

On a panel at the Ad:Tech conference in New York earlier this month, Beth Comstock, president for integrated media at NBC Universal, said that “Video has been liberated” from the TV set.

In an article this week, the New York Times notes that emerging online video clips are becoming more regular and more frequent – but aren’t nearly as long as a traditional 30-minute or 60-minute show on TV, a conscious effort driven by the theory that viewers aren’t willing to sit at the computer monitors for such a long time.

The article also notes a handful of shows that are growing in popularity and are getting advertising built in. A MySpace series called “Roommates,” for example, features the Ford Focus while an online show called “Mr. Robinson’s Driving School” on MSN features the Volvo C30.

Jayant Kadambi