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

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced yesterday the release of “In-Stream Ad Format Guidelines.” YuMe was involved in crafting these, which like any process where you try and get multiple companies to agree, was trying at times. That being said, we are very excited to finally have some parameters out in the marketplace that make buying video advertising easier!

Video is still a moving target and it is still early in the game, but the guidelines announced are at least a step in the right direction and should help encourage consistency across publishers in terms of ad formats and specs supported.

Ad products addressed by the guidelines include:

Linear video ads – ads that are consumed before, in the middle or after the video content. Just like a commercial on TV. Examples include pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls.

Non-linear video ads – ads that run concurrently with the video content so the user sees the ad while viewing the content. An example of this is the increasingly popular interactive overlay ad. Below is an example of this ad format that we created for one of our advertisers - Kellogg’s.

Companion ads – display ads, rich media, or skins that wrap around the video experience.

Andy Plesser from Beet.TV did a great post on this announcement that I recommend checking out.

Also, as part of these guidelines the IAB launched an Ad Format Compliance Seal and I am happy to say that we at YuMe are already compliant.

- Molly Glover Gallatin