The birth of television over 50 years ago kicked off the trend of viewing media on small screens. Today, 90% of American media consumption is done on screens totaling over 4 hours spent daily across phones, tablets, TVs, and laptops.

If we look at smartphones alone, we are currently at 56% penetration in the US. It makes sense that advertisers are increasingly viewing mobile as not only an experimental part of the budget, but as a valid force of its own. In fact, an August 2013 eMarketer study estimates that mobile will capture almost half of total digital ad spend in North America by 2017. Indeed, mobile usage is rapidly taking over as a standard way of life. Consumers transition seamlessly from device to device over the course of the day — they may start a search on a smartphone, switch to a laptop to read more information on a larger screen, then finish the task on their tablet as they head out the door.

Last year, Oreo’s “dunk in the dark” tweet pulled the promise of agile marketing into focus for marketers of all kinds. As we approach this years contest, social media teams will no doubt assemble in their war rooms, hoping to have their own viral moment. Even if you don't have a war room, here are some tips to make the most of the Super Bowl opportunity.

A blog post by consultant Mark Schaefer (Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy) has been fodder for countless water-cooler conversations and online commentary since its publication a couple of weeks ago. Are consumers drowning in a deluge of content, and, if so, what does this mean for content marketing, one of the most rapidly-growing and promising marketing approaches of the last couple of years?

Call me a skeptic, with at least a portion of his argument.

I remember similar conversations about behavioral targeting years ago: is it effective or creepy? The conclusion many came to at a conference discussion was that when it's done well, it's very effective; when it's not done well, it verges on being stalkerish. If you're in the market for a new set of wheels, ads touting deals from local dealerships are welcome. On the other hand, ads making assumptions about your interests based on flimsier evidence can raise eyebrows: just because I'm a guy and over 40 doesn't mean I'm necessarily interested in baldness remedies.

Schaefer's thesis relies on the assumption that content marketers are approaching their trade with the same ham-handedness as those trying to sell me minoxidil. Churning out ever-increasing quantities of content hoping that they'll be met with users' attention isn't a workable solution as content marketing matures.

Instead, more effective targeting is what's in order.

Nowadays it has become standard practice to gather and measure information about how people are interacting with your company's products.

This helps with anything from testing creative concepts to demonstrating the ROI of marketing. But there is another type of data that you may not be as familiar with, that provides an additional layer of insight to understanding customers. It is called event analytics, and it is one of the most powerful ways to gather and measure information.

Event analytics is a term that refers to the various events that are triggered by interacting with software, and the interesting things that those events can tell us.

For example, every time someone loads a web page, swipes on a mobile app, takes a digital photo, sends a text message, or fills out a form, there is a software event that is triggered to make that happen. In a person’s everyday interaction with mobile phones, tablets, and computers, they can create hundreds -- or even thousands -- of these events. Event analytics is about capturing those events, as well as the unique properties related to how and why they were created, and then using them to measure and learn things.

Do you like mobile leaderboards? You know, the skinny little ad at the bottom of your screen? The one you accidentally hit while scrolling? Probably not. I'm sorry to say, it’s not a particularly appreciated ad format.

Well, actually there is one group of people that loves those 320x50s. Advertisers.

Mobile leaderboards are the dominant mobile ad format. 320x50s made up 82% of total mobile ad impressions in Q3 last year, according to one study: Global Digital Audience Report Q3 2013.

So, will the most popular mobile ad format go away anytime soon? That seems unlikely. Accepting as a given that the mobile leaderboard will continue to be the most popular, here are some ways to improve it.

Let’s start with the basics. Is the ad clear enough to communicate its message? Oddly enough—the answer to this question is often “no.”

Although the Golden Globes are behind us, the Grammys, Super Bowl, and Oscars are imminent. And with such a large chunk of the US viewing audience planted on the sofa, punching button on the remote with one hand and swiping through screens on their phone or tablet with the other, these events present enormous challenges and opportunities for multi-screen advertisers.

The biggest brands, those who understand how social media works, will be drawing lessons from Oreo's coup during last year's Super Bowl blackout and assembling their "war rooms" ready to pounce on any marketing opportunity during these blockbuster events. Brands that are set up to respond and leverage context to establish a brand presence will be rewarded; for instance, Tide, responding quickly to clean up a NASCAR crash's fuel spill in 2012, earned an estimated $8 million in free media as fans poured their gratitude into social media.

Most advertisers won't have an opportunity of quite that scale, but many will publish updates that strike a tone with social media followers and will want to get as much mileage out of them as possible.

How do they do it?

Companies in all sectors are using HTML5 to offer cross-platform, multi-screen experiences to digital audiences. 

Many heavy-weight publishers have rebuilt their websites using HTML5. Hearst was an early adopter. By mid-2012, they transitioned the sites to for their magazine catalogue to HTML5, including Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine. At the same time, they launched an ad exchange to allow advertisers to scale mobile ads across these sites.

Many other publishers have moved their sites over to HTML5, including most recently The New York Times, whose site launched in January 2014 is built with HTML5...

Flite is proud to announce that our clients, Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) and Kellogg Company, won the prestigious Portada Award for "Top Hispanic Digital Advertising Campaign and Execution" at the 7th Annual Hispanic Advertising and Media Conference.

The content-driven advertising campaign included three different versions of both Spanish and English language creatives across multiple ad sizes for desktop and mobile. The ad units were updated throughout the five-month campaign, using Flite agile marketing technology to showcase fresh news and apply real-time insights to display ads. 

Content marketing, native advertising, and mobile have been the hottest buzzwords in digital advertising over the past year. With good reason. Brand content and native placement have invigorated display, which has been slowly waning in effectiveness for quite some time, and mobile media consumption continues to skyrocket.

Mobile advertising, however, has long languished in the doldrums of banner blindness and fat-finger syndrome. However, there are signs of a light at the end of this potentially enormous tunnel, and it's driven by a number of emerging trends.

1. Continuing Mobile Usage Growth

If you've been following the industry news for any extent of time, this is a no-brainer. Internet device usage has been rapidly migrating from PCs and laptops to smartphones and tablets over the last couple of years. As eMarketer noted in August, US consumers are now spending a touch more time interacting with mobile devices throughout the day than with computers: 19.4% of their total interaction time with major media vs 19.2%, respectively. That trend shows no sign of slowing down, either.

For those of us that work in ecommerce it sometimes seems that every retail dollar spent in the US is being spent online.

That impression happens to be far removed from reality.

In fact, ecommerce spending only accounted for 6% of US retail sales in the third quarter of 2013.

We are twenty years into the age of Amazon and Americans still do 94% of their retail shopping offline.

That helps us understand why Jeff Bezos is focused more on cash flow than profitability: there is so much room left to grow, so much value left to create and to capture.

So why is ecommerce not growing any faster?

If you’re looking to use paid media for better exposure for your content, you’re probably already aware of options like social media promotion, content discovery services like Outbrain or Taboola, or native advertising.

But you may not as aware of using display advertising to distribute your content.

Content advertising benefits by having the most expansive reach and targeting opportunities of any of the paid content scaling methods. Content ads are also more visually customizable, compared to social and native ads for instance. This method also doesn’t require a thriving social media presence.

Here are a few tips to using display to distribute your content.

Starcom MediaVest Group launched today CONTENT@SCALE, a platform that brands can use to enrich their digital advertising with high-quality, vetted, relevant content from premium publishers. Flite powers the technology running this innovative advertising and content marketing solution.

From the press release:

Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), a division of Publicis Groupe, announced today the launch of CONTENT@SCALE, a next-generation technology platform that will make content available from some of the world’s best publishers to brands at scale.  This new platform will allow SMG clients who participate to surface evergreen content from these publishers across a number of categories including entertainment, health, technology, fashion and more, to publish live into paid media and engage consumers with the topics they care most about right now.  SMG will create this product with leading publishers to make their content available, including: Ahalogy, Demand Media, Glam Media, Forbes, Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Parade, Rodale Inc. and Time, Inc. and CONTENT@SCALE will launch in beta in North America in Q1, and will then roll out globally by the second half of 2014.

2013 was a remarkable year for Flite. We saw impressions grow 2.75X from previous year, including a 24X jump in HTML5 ad impressions in particular. All the data clearly shows that the paradigm shift toward multi-screen advertising—ads that work on both desktop and mobile devices—is definitely underway.

Looking back on 2013, here were some of the milestone accomplishments at Flite: