Randall Rothenberg is the Executive Chair of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the trade association for digital media and marketing in the United States. Among the IAB’s 750 member companies are such major platforms as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Snap; the nation’s most important ad-supported media companies, including The New York Times, Walt Disney Co., NBC Universal, ViacomCBS, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, Verizon Media, Hulu, Warner Media, LinkedIn, and Meredith; incumbent and disruptor brands, including Coca-Cola, Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Hubble Contacts, ThirdLove, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, and Citigroup; and scores of technology and data companies, among them Mediamath, LiveRamp, Quantcast, and Pubmatic.
With these members and its 47 affiliate associations on every inhabited continent, the IAB and its sister technology-standards group, the IAB Tech Lab, serve as the digital marketing industry’s public policy and lobbying organization, market and consumer research center, training and development base, and hub for the development of standards and best practices.
Mr. Rothenberg joined the IAB in January 2007 as President and Chief Executive Officer, and led the organization until becoming Executive Chair in September 2020. During his tenure, the organization became one of the largest and most influential media and marketing trade bodies in the world, helping to develop technical standards, self-regulation, government regulation, market and consumer research, and professional development programs to protect consumer privacy, foster brand and media revenue growth, improve data security, and reduce supply chain friction in the digital marketing industry.
Prior to his IAB role, Mr. Rothenberg was the Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Director of Intellectual Capital at Booz Allen Hamilton, the international strategy and technology consulting firm, where he oversaw business development, knowledge management, and thought leadership activities, and directed the award-winning quarterly business magazine strategy+business, Strategy+Business Books, www.strategy-business.com, and other electronic and print publications for senior business executives.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Rothenberg spent six years at The New York Times, where he was the technology editor and politics editor of the Sunday magazine, the daily advertising columnist, and a media and marketing reporter. For 10 years, he was a marketing and media columnist for Advertising Age. Mr. Rothenberg has written for a score of major national magazines, among them Esquire, GQ, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and New York Magazine. He is the author of four books, including Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), a critically-acclaimed chronicle of the birth, evolution, and death of a single advertising campaign.
Mr. Rothenberg, an avid nature, urban, and portrait photographer, serves on the Board of Directors of the International Center of Photography and the Board of Overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review. He received an undergraduate degree in Classics from Princeton and lives in New York City.
Why necessary? Because there’s nary a conversation in the marketing-media landscape these days that doesn’t touch on the issue of co-opetition — the increasing tendency in decentralizing industries for competitors in one arena to become collaborators in another. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a good term for those that engage in co-opetition. “Co-opetitors” never did seem to cut it.