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).
Coming from an agency background, I've witnessed firsthand how difficult it can be to execute on a complex digital ad campaign.
A typical media plan might include over fifty ad placements, running on various properties, in different sizes, with multiple creatives. Trafficking was never a simple process, but as ad technologies have evolved, the workflow has become even messier. Juggling between a media plan, trafficking sheets, and other campaign information in your emails is frustrating and leaves plenty of room for human error.
That’s why I was thrilled last week to announce the general release of Campaign Studio. This is a tool for ad ops, analysts and media planners. It’s the product of a lot interviews and hard thinking to answer the question, “How can we make ad trafficking better?”
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.
