Flite recently restructured our entire company into cross-functional teams and it’s working great for us. We tested this concept early in the year by forming a few small teams. By combining sales people with developers and account managers with marketers into teams, they are able to work with common priorities and shared goals. A few months ago we pushed this further and reorganized our whole company into multiple cross-functional teams designed out of what we found worked in our smaller tests.
Some of the benefits we’re seeing:
- Better communication between team members
- More empowerment throughout our organization
- Higher quality product releases
- Happier people
Those are the top pluses, and add up to more than enough reason to be excited about it.
I was in the audience for a panel on the future of native ads a few weeks ago. It didn't take long for the panel, which was made up of ad tech executives, to find the first point to disagree on: What's the definition of a 'native ad'. After a little bickering, the moderator was able to get the group to agree on something like this:
Native ads are paid media units that take on the form of the environment they are displayed in.
That worked for me.
More debate followed about "what was the first example of a native ad?" and "do we need to consider print or just digital when thinking native?" For the context of this post, let's consider only online digital native ads while we dive into some examples to shed light on those questions. Along the way we will uncover some of the sources of controversy that drive the debates around native ad formats.
