Flite Labs, An Ad Developer's Playground

Want to add new features to Ad Studio? Create custom re-usable parts for your ads? Flite Labs is the place to go.

On Flite Labs, you can extend the power of Flite through advanced components, or get your developers started on building features unique to your company.

Flite Labs components are mini-applications for your ads, creating by our users and vetted by our team. They often perform a more narrow, specific function than the default components in Ad Studio -- such as creating an Age Gate for 18+ content, or configuring an ad to show different creative based on if it is day time or night time. The components are still configurable and styleable, like the standard Ad Studio components.

Multi-screen Web Design: Evidence of the Coming Mobile-ocalpyse

Coke's new website looks more like an online magazine than a brand page.

Elegant web design has finally taken hold. It’s all over the web, and it’s about time. Good-looking web pages abound, influenced by the touch-screen devices they’re viewable on. Responsive and mobile-inspired sites aren’t just a trend; they’re a shift in the status quo -- just one more sign of the impending mobile-ocalypse.

Take, for example, NBC.com, whose recent redesign feels like the offspring of Hulu and Pinterest, in a good way. Hulu.com also revamped their site just a few months ago to be more in line with the touch panel trend. Add to the list notable sites like Mashable (now in beta) and USA Today.

How Paid Media Publishing Shortens the Path to Brand Content

Flite is leading the charge in paid media publishing, leveraging the web in ways that make digital advertising truly unique from print and TV advertising. Publishing content into ads enables brands to utilize the real-time, dynamic nature of digital media to tell their stories.

A content-rich approach to “converged media” (paid, owned and earned media) engages audiences by adding value and relevance to their online experiences. Through publishing their brand assets to paid media, not just to their websites and social media, advertisers shorten the path to their strongest content.

CEO Will Price at Xconomy Forum: The Power of the Pivot

CEO Will Price is speaking at the upcoming Xconomy Forum: The Power of the Pivot on December 4th in Palo Alto.  Will will be taking the stage with other entrepreneurs, startup gurus, and investors at this half-day event to discuss the how, when, and why of pivots.  Join us for a half-day full of stories about pivots that worked (and a few that didn't).  

Flite’s IAB Rising Star Templates

Flite Ad Studio now contains starter templates for IAB Rising Star display ad units.

Widely touted as the next generation of interactive advertising, the Rising Star units consistently outperform traditional formats with 2.5x the interaction rate and 2x more interaction time than their predecessors.

To streamline your design process, the new templates in Ad Studio are fully functional. Simply drop your content into the starter unit and style the ad. All templates are pre-filled with instructions, so you can be up and running in no time.

The Rising Star templates meet IAB standards, but the flexibility of Ad Studio gives you room to exercise your creative license if you need to go outside the predetermined specifications.

For examples of the Rising Star formats, check out our interactive demo page.

 

Report Studio Public Beta — Now Live!

Report Studio public BETA is now live for all our customers!

Gain valuable ad-placement insights to answer those “what happened?” questions. Then optimize your campaigns based on data in Flite’s advanced analytics.

Report Studio adds another layer of flexibility and depth to Flite Metrics. To get started generating campaign-level reporting, choose “Make New Item > Report”.

Need a demo of Report Studio? We’ll show you the ropes. Just let your Flite rep know, or send us a message.

Where Is Good Design In Digital Advertising? — Guest Post By Prateek Alsi

 

Flite's Guest Blogger series features the industry's top thought-leaders to share insights on display advertising, agile marketing, and innovation.

Prateek Alsi is the Director of Distribution Partnerships at Square. The thoughts represented here are his own.

--- 

Success in Silicon Valley has traditionally hinged heavily on hiring the best engineering talent. But we’re witnessing a seismic shift. Hiring the brightest programmers – while essential for building world-class products – is just table stakes for the next set of disruptive companies. The youngest generation of rising tech companies has realized one thing: it’s all about design.

Take Uber, the black-car hailing service that has made a complex logistics operation effortless. On the surface it is nothing more than a mobile app that sends a black town car to pick you up when you press a button on your phone. Or consider Peek, a new online travel site that helps you discover things to do when visiting a new locale. And let’s not forget the now ubiquitous discovery apps that we all use to pin or post what we fancy. Even last month’s Fast Company magazine was dedicated to the now-famous quote of IBM’s legendary CEO that “good design is good business.”

Flite and Starcom MediaVest Group Form Milestone Partnership

Today we are announcing a strategic partnership with Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), one of the world’s largest brand communications agencies. Through this milestone agreement, SMG will use Flite to "realize the promise of brands as publishers" across paid media channels.

 

Read the full press release here.

Flite’s Guest Blogger Series

L'Oreal, Conde Nast, Universal McCann, Hummer Winblad.  

What do these companies have in common?  These are some of the top brands and publishers that have participated in Flite's Guest Blogger Series, a program that features articles written by the industry's top thought-leaders.

We're excited to announce that we're opening up submissions for the next round of guest bloggers.

Market Like a Toddler

Photo Credit: Ocean/Corbis

During my 10 years in advertising and media I’ve thought a lot about Brands.  Maybe too much.  Most of those 10 years I tried to understand what all that advertising and media was doing for a brand.  Many times I lamented the fact that many of the brands were just too hard to advertise.  The products had no real distinctiveness.  Brands are aspirational in their uniqueness -- and advertising has to fall back on propaganda-like manipulation tactics to create a perceived difference.

There are countless ways to measure the value of a brand.  Valuable brands can maintain higher prices, retain customers longer, and/or spend less on marketing as a percentage of revenue.  But, if you survey some of the most recognized brands out there, they are valuable because they have created perceived differences (advantages).  Coke, Nike, Apple -- the brands all signify something beyond rational product benefits.  

What does this mean?  Good branding makes you feel more for a product or service beyond its rational characteristics.  That’s not a bad thing.

This Commercial Made You Cry, Unless You Missed It

I want you to watch a commercial.

Months ago my fellow blog-contributor saw it as a Creativity Pick of the Day on AdAge and shared it. The commercial was so good it still sticks with me today.

On the afternoon I saw it for the first time I was enchanted. I loved it.

So I sent the link to my wife. She watched it, cried, and then watched it again. Then she sent it to her mom.

The story of how my mother-in-law got to watch a P&G ad is not unlike the story of any other brand marketing, where all too often a brand’s compelling content doesn’t get the eyes it deserves. The content plays its role in the media plan or gets dropped on to a website -- two perfectly wonderful outcomes -- but that’s where it ends.