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.

The next major trend in display advertising is to bring branded content into ads. This allows consumers to interact with content — like recipes or news articles — directly in ads, thus circumventing the elusive clickthrough as a KPI. In order to do this, marketers must create content, then find a way to make the process of bringing the content into ads repeatable and scalable.

Even before the ad creation process starts, creating content — to pull into ads or otherwise — is difficult in itself. According to a 2013 survey by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 64% of marketers are challenged with producing enough content, 52% with producing the kind of content, and 45% with producing a variety of content.

Content marketing has matured and brands now are seeking to broaden the uses and impact of content into paid media. Sometimes called "content advertising," this trend has the potential to have a transformative impact on display advertising.

Here are 5 principles to help you launch your first content ads campaign.

Back in April, we took a look at Terence Kawaja's LUMAscape for the digital ad space (at the time, it was useful to draw a comparison with the IAB's new Digital Advertising Arena chart).

Reflecting the growth and complexity of the emerging native and content advertising space, Luma Partners has released a new LUMAscape. Like the others, it's crowded with a well over a hundred logos, a reflection of the rapid proliferation of roles in the rapidly evolving native and content advertising world.

Brands are building a great presence on social networks and are looking for ways of making their quality content more accessible for consumers.

While social media has grown dramatically in terms of brand spend in the past ten years, the idea of incorporating social media into paid media -- via online ads -- is still fairly new. However, social media is not a tactic that stands alone from advertising campaigns, and therefore benefits from being integrated into an overall media plan and enhanced by paid media placements.

Flash is the dominant technology for display advertising, but Flash isn’t supported on mobile and tablet devices. In this infographic, see how smartphone proliferation indicates a need to embrace both Flash and HTML5 for display ads.

Replete with blisteringly cold weather, January was a newsworthy month across the country. It also happened to be a busy month on the Flite blog. In case you missed any of them, check out below the January 2014 posts that were most popular with our readers.

5. How Video Will Transform Retail

In this guest post by Joyus's VP of Business Development, Guy Gal, the case is made for video as the medium to bring the vitality and fun of IRL shopping to online. Despite Amazon, eBay, Overstock and others making tremendous inroads into changing our shopping patterns, they only capture 6% of the US retail market. Guy Gal explains why video is poised to help online take a bigger bite of the very large retail pie.

There is one day each year when people actually like ads: during the Superbowl. Now that that's over, most people have gone back to ignoring ads.

And yet, paid media is still the best way to get your brand message out to millions of people in a scalable, consistent way. After working with an extensive base of Fortune 500 companies -- Shell, Kraft, Charles Schwab — and publishers — Rolling Stones, Glam.com, FoodNetwork.com — we've found that there are themes that successful advertising campaigns have in common.

If you want to increase your chances of having consumers like your ads, read on.

1. Let them have content.

Don’t force users to click on an ad in order to access brand content. In the old days, online ads consisted of a static image and text. Now, technology allows brands to pull forward content that was originally only on your landing page, that now can live directly in the ad unit itself. 

The Grammys were a week ago, but Arby's brilliant Twitter coup is still being lauded as this year's event's "Oreo moment." Marketers gearing for the Super Bowl were taking cues from the likes of these social media vanguards as they primed themselves to squeeze every last bit of value out their event-day marketing budgets. Other non-sponsors were trying to leverage creativity and humor in social media to steal some of the spotlight; JCPenney might have been the winner this year.

But were they leaving any marketing value on the table?

Advertisers lined up to pay a staggering $4 million for a 30-second TV spot, and game-day war rooms were staffed with copywriters, designers, lawyers and social media strategists to get as much attention from armchair quarterbacks volleying Tweets back and forth. NFL and others tested location-based mobile promotions. Digital media was bought and thematic ad creatives ready to start serving on Sunday.

OK, wait...that last bit there. What?