Paul Kotas may be the most important person in internet advertising that almost nobody in advertising has ever heard of.
Mention Kotas—the leader of Amazon’s burgeoning, multibillion-dollar ad businesses—around ad agencies, as The Information did to more than a half-dozen senior ad executives, and you’ll get blank stares. One of those executives, whose agency will spend between $100 million and $150 million on streaming video ads alone this year with Amazon, Google-stalked Kotas in the middle of a phone interview to see if he could recognize Kotas. He couldn’t.
“I have not heard of him,” said David Campanelli, co–chief investment officer at Horizon Media, a top ad agency, when asked about Kotas.
