Native advertising continues to make substantial inroads across a wide range of publishers; even some previously resistant pubs, like the New York Times, have gotten on board. Their success has prompted rapid migration onto mobile screens as well, providing some hope to mobile publishers and app developers who had until recently struggled to extract meaningful value from their smartphone and tablet inventory.

While the earliest mobile native pioneers have been the largest social networks—Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn organize their content into feeds that lend themselves well to the story-driven native placements we profiled in our eBook on native advertising—other prominent publishers and app developers have also successfully made the leap. 

Considering content marketing's enormous scope—$44 billion according to a comprehensive estimate by the Custom Content Council—it's no surprise that a large range of software and platform solutions have emerged to help scale marketers' workflows. Altimeter Group, a tech research and consulting firm, has just released a report on the landscape of content marketing software vendors that provides context to the various service segments.

The report begins with the premise that platform/tool selection is a difficult proposition. Vendors' offerings are highly differentiated and present a wide range of capabilities that might not be relevant to all marketers' needs. The report's author, Rebecca Lieb, suggests that evolution in the space will drive consolidation and the formation of end-to-end solutions incorporating capabilities from content creation to compliance within the next two years. 

After six years as CEO of Flite, I am thrilled to announce that Giles Goodwin is succeeding me as CEO.  Giles will be responsible for defining Flite's vision, leading our talented team, and working with our top partners and customers to realize the promise of content marketing's future.

First, I want to thank Flite's employees, customers, partners, and investors for allowing me the honor of leading this fine organization. I leave a different and better person for having led Flite.

NBC Universal's President of Research and Media Development, Alan Wurtzel, made waves a couple of days ago in an interview with the Financial Times when he claimed that social media "is not a game changer yet" in driving television viewing. The revelation was a bit of a shock to those of us who regularly see hashtags planted in the corner of our favorite television shows, and assumed that we were the only ones not tweeting at every discussion-worthy plot twist.

As it turns out, Wurtzel drew his conclusions based on the Winter Olympics, which NBC had exclusive rights to broadcast. Across the 1500+ hours of coverage over 18 days, his team's research found that approx 3 million unique users, or about 19% of the television viewing audience, posted 10.6 million Tweets, and around 20 million people somehow engaged with Olympics-related commentary on Facebook. His conclusion? Popular shows drive social media activity, not the other way around.

Not everyone agrees with his conclusion. 

No one in the digital advertising space has missed the explosion of social media activity by large brands over the past few years, particularly during major media and sporting events when everyone's eyes are shuttling between their television and their phone or tablet. After every year's Oscars and Super Bowl, the advertising world is abuzz with chatter about which social media forays garnered outsized attention for brands (think Oreo at the Super Bowl in 2013 and Arby's at the Grammys this year). Brands with an impeccable sense of timing and creative smarts earn well-deserved kudos.

This year, brands will use real-time marketing to enhance the World Cup viewing experience. Instead of being drowned out by the massively-popular event, telling brand stories in real-time offers brands an opportunity to be part of the conversation.

Coke, for instance, has stated they're going full speed ahead with real-time marketing during the 2014 World Cup.

Paul Dwan, Head of Assets and Experiential at Coke explained the importance of real-time marketing during panel at Advertising Week Europe 2014...

You could say that I like ads.

I know that to “like ads” sounds funny, but I’m in the business. Some people not in advertising don’t seem to be as keen about ads as I am. That's fair.

At best, I think most folks begrudgingly accept that ads are necessary to make other great things happen, like make apps or content free. Ads have the noble function of helping reward good companies with a source revenue. But if ads do have a bit of a PR problem with the public at large, it's because they don’t make the value they provide explicit enough.

Think about it.

Most display ads these days are functionally very similar to what they were 10 years ago. I find this odd, given how the rest of online marketing has marched forward to embrace new modes of interacting with potential customers. Are you advertising like it’s 1999? I hope not.

Flite Co-Founder and President of Product and Technology Giles Goodwin authored a "Data-Driven Thinking" column for AdExchanger on the promise of native advertising, and how both media buyers and sellers will have to give up a bit more control in the process in order to achieve scale.

Native advertising has grown by leaps and bounds, but why hasn’t it knocked out the lowly banner? It has not reached scale, whereas banner advertising, whether direct or via RTB, enjoys almost limitless application and scope. Programmatic has only reduced friction and enhanced targeting. Native ads might be worth caring about, but the lack of scalability has rendered them a niche player.

The IAB recently published a comprehensive report on native advertising, guiding the industry one step closer to an official definition.

To get everyone on the same page, for months they have been working with industry leaders to share knowledge and create a common language to talk about native. This culminated in the release the IAB Native Advertising Playbook, which is based on discussions from a task-force of companies in the ad space. The report looks at what types of native ads exist, and how what elements vary across each type of native ad.

There are two traits common to all native ads...

Several parallel developments are underway that are setting the stage for mobile video native advertising to make an outsized impact on the digital ad space in the coming years.

• Native advertising continues to grow. eMarketer is projecting $3.1 billion in spend this year, a 29% increase over 2013's $2.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal and mobile news app Circa are among the latest publishers announcing the move to native.
• Consumers are increasingly watching video on mobile. Smartphones' larger, higher-res screens, coupled with better (read: 4G) mobile data bandwidth, have made video consumption on mobile more tenable. According to Business Insider, mobile's share of online video has jumped from 4% at the start of 2012 to over 14% at the close of 2013. Cisco claims that this amounted to 53% of total mobile data traffic.
• There's greater appetite for longer-form video. As viewers are more apt to watch full episode- and movie-length video, their tolerance for 30- to 60-second video spots typical for television grows. As one such measure, ads for video content longer than 20 minutes grew 86% YOY, while the same for short- (less than 5 minutes) and medium-length clips (5-20 minutes) saw ad views grow by a more modest 22% and 13%, respectively (source: FreeWheel).

Along with our partner Starcom MediaVest Group, Flite launched CONTENT@SCALE, the next-generation platform for curating and distributing licensed content from premium publishers into display ads in real-time, at CES in early January. The program enjoyed terrific reactions from the press, and it's grown in leaps and bounds since then, with many more publishers adding their content to our ever-expanding library. A number of brand clients have also kicked off successful campaigns using the service.

If you're intrigued by CONTENT@SCALE and would like to know a bit more about how it works at a practical level, check out this newly-released video that explains what it offers participating advertisers and how the interface works in concert with the Flite Design Studio.

We are witnessing a convergence in digital advertising. Smartphones and tablets now have widespread adoption. At the same time, consumers have a sharply increased preference for animated, interactive advertising over static banners. These two trends coming together have strong implications for the technologies that power digital ads.

Device proliferation is surging. A threshold was crossed in April 2013 when we reached a multi-screen majority and more than half of US consumers engaged with media on both computers and phones. The number hit 54% in June 2013. This rising rate of media consumption patterns across devices indicates that multi-screen is the new status quo.

Users are on the move. Not only are they taking their devices with them, but they are also hopping from device to device.

We recently published a case study that underscores the ability of content-rich ads to amplify and extend the impact of brand messages.

In the profiled campaign, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, eager to connect with Hispanic mothers, worked with agency Starcom MediaVest Group and publisher MamásLatinas to create interactive ads with embedded videos and article content that would resonate with Latina mothers interested in ideas for family activities. Leveraging the unique set of capabilities in the Flite Platform, Kellogg's updated their in-market ad units with fresh content on a regular basis, and, as an agile marketing best practice, included comments and responses to ads shared in social media within ad updates themselves.

We are marketing in the age of the always-on consumer, a majority group that takes web access with them on-the-go. Being always-on means these consumers are persistently connected to the web, which presents new opportunities and challenges in brand storytelling.

Always-on consumers now make up about half of the US market. ComScore confirmed last year that at least 54% of consumers were using multiple devices—such as a laptop and a smartphone—to consume media. The trend is growing.

The Vivaldi Always-On Consumer 2014 report had similar results, estimating that 48% of the US population are now “always-on consumers” who are connected online with multiple devices and from locations throughout their daily lives.

To market to always-on consumers successfully, you must find new ways to connect with them, collaborate, and support them in a way that is also increasingly also always-on.

To begin with, let's clarify that always-on marketing goes beyond simply being multi-platform...

Flite is thrilled to announce a partnership which offers Atlas customers a complete end-to-end workflow for rich media display advertising. This partnership combines the best of both worlds: the real-time and content-driven features of the Flite Design Studio, with the robust Atlas ad serving solution.

This integration streamlines the ad creation and campaign management processes for advertisers, covering everything from creative development to trafficking and metrics. Advertisers can now use Flite to build dynamic ads, traffic them through Atlas, and fully capitalize on in-depth metrics reporting across an entire campaign. 

Although digital advertising employs some of the most sophisticated web technology available, it's striking how behind the times the typical campaign workflow can be. In response to a need for a better way, today Flite is unveiling Campaign Studio, which will provide enormous efficiencies to a process that usually involves way too many spreadsheets.

Campaign Studio was built with ad ops, agency and media planners in mind, to save time in a process that is typically labor-intensive. You can now create, manage and measure the impact of an entire campaign. Tools are in place to segment your campaign into specific groupings of placements or ads that can be scheduled to flight together and grouped together for reporting purposes.

When you first started doing content marketing, you were probably itching to get started tackling the mountain of topics you wanted to cover. Soon, you probably realized that creating a steady stream of content is more difficult than it seemed. And maybe you felt like you already exhausted everything you could possibly discuss in a blog post, video, or tweet.

The reality is that there are virtually unlimited things you can write about. But you do have to be creative. The solution is different for every brand, which is why starting with questions is an organic way to find a solution that works for you. 

Display advertising is growing. Shocked? While executives at Yahoo may differ, more sanguine projections from eMarketer paint a rosier picture, including the eye-opening expectation that display will eclipse search advertising in the next calendar year. At $21.2 billion, display is projected to capture 44% of 2014's US digital ad spend. While search advertising has single-digit growth rates going forward, display will enjoy double-digit percentage increases through 2017.

So what's reinvigorating display, bringing it back from the digital advertising doldrums? eMarketer points to four things:

1. Content-richness.
2. Programmatic direct.
3. Multi-screen.
4. Viewability.

Let's take a brief look at each of these trends and their impact on the overall display market.