Ever since Oreo responded to the Super Bowl blackout and garnered nearly 7 million tweets, marketers have paid extra attention to the concept of real-time marketing.

Real-time marketing has ample potential because it allows marketers to connect with consumers in more relevant ways by taking into account cultural and news content happening in the moment. Consumers are responding favorably as well. According to a May 2013 eMarketer study, those exposed to real-time marketing were much more likely to take action with the brand the same day.

By now, brands are accustomed to using social media as the main form of real-time marketing. But there are other key ways that marketers can, and should, be integrating real-time into their overall marketing strategy. Here are some ways to get started.

Real-time Coupons Based on Geolocation

Smartphone usage has reached an all-time high of 56% penetration in the US. As such, brands are beginning to see that they must have a strong mobile presence to reach customers where they are spending their time. Luckily, many ideas that were one-off executions are now more accessible due to mobile proliferation.

It was only 2 weeks ago that we opened up access to Design Studio HTML5 for free, and already more than 1400 users have started creating and sharing multi-screen creatives.

New users trying to find their way around may enjoy these videos for Design Studio beginners.

As we head into the Thanksgiving break (or Thanksgivukkah, the hybrid holiday that replaces your mashed potatoes with latkes), "scale" is a sort of dangerous term in mixed company. But it's a highly relevant one when we're talking about the common constraint for both content marketing and native advertising, two approaches that have exploded in popularity recently.

The common barriers to scale in both approaches are sourcing a consistent supply of quality content, and distributing it to those are inclined to consume it. Considering that both barriers are surmountable—given a solid strategy, budget and marketing operations integration—this problem shouldn't be too formidable. Certainly less formidable than stomaching turkey leftovers for a week.

Content Development at Scale

In Hexagram's recently-released report on native advertising, 66% of brands using native advertising generate the content themselves, while about a quarter rely on support from publishers and/or agencies.

The reasons for doing content marketing are many: generating thought leadership, providing relevant information to customers, encouraging engagement, moving prospects through the sales funnel, and more. With all of these diverse reasons, how do you prevent yourself from drowning in metrics for measuring whether each cause is effective? 

Luckily, there are a few key metrics that apply across the board for determining whether your content marketing is successful. Here are some ideas for focusing your attention on a core set of metrics that matter most:

Engagement

Engagement is a measure of how often, and to what level of depth, your customers interact with your brand. There are a few indications of how sticky your brand is, including:

• Page Views: The total number of pages viewed on your site. For example, a user could look at only your homepage before clicking away, or that person could check out fifteen pages all over your site.
• Average Visit Duration: This is the average time that a user spends on your website when they visit. Since this number is an average, it's determined by taking the total minutes that someone has been on your site, and dividing it by the number of times that they've visited your site in a certain time period.

The inbound marketing process of building links, SEO and developing a social media or blog following lacks the immediacy needed to make the short-term differences necessary to make content marketing successful for most companies.

To boost views and engagement with content, and to act as a catalyst for organic sharing, the majority of marketers are turning to paid methods of content distribution.

Although it hasn't earned rave reviews, the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch is yet another connected smart device orbiting in the Galaxy range of products, which includes the most popular Android smartphone and a popular line of tablets and phablets. Taking a step back, the proliferation of products makes sense. At its first developers' conference a few weeks ago, Samsung unveiled a new multi-screen SDK that will enable the development of cross-device content sharing.  And while the Korean conglomerate is the current heir apparent to the Android juggernaut, it isn't the only company jockeying for a position in this high-stakes competition:

• Google follows users across PCs, tablets, and smartphones, through its own OS (Android) and popular browser (Chrome), which already sync across devices connected through the same Google account. Through Chromecast, it also makes televisions Google-connected devices.

"I gave up on Google Web Designer almost immediately."

Those were the words of a web designer and his first reaction when doing a product review.

This week, our CEO Will Price publicly dared a web designer to try Flite Design Studio HTML5, and compare it to the incumbent, Google Web Designer.

The designer started with a Photoshop file with many layers for changing text. With Flite, he was able to bring in the Photoshop file easily and create events triggered by specific layers. But with Google? Not so much. 

There are many scattered statistics about mobile advertising, but what do they mean for marketers? Below are the top insights we gleaned after reviewing dozens of statistics about mobile usage across the US. Read on to see what this data means and why it matters for your brand. 

1. People are connected to their phones. A mobile device is now an integral part of daily life for most consumers.

• There are 5x as many cellphones in the world as PCs. (ImpigoMobile)
• 91% of adults keep their smartphones within arm’s reach. (Morgan Stanley)
• Tablet and smartphone users spent an average of 94 minutes with a mobile device, but only 72 minutes on the web through other methods. (Blog.flurry.com)

2. Mobile drives people to action more than any other platform.

• 9 out of 10 mobile searches lead to action. (SearchEngineLand)
• More than 50% of mobile searches lead to sales. (SearchEngineLand)
• 50% of survey respondents report responding to a text offer, and of that group, 32% have scanned a coupon via a QR code. (Marketingcharts.com)

One of the trickier things about designing rich media ads is fitting content and messaging into the small real-estate of a display ad. All too often the outcome is a very barebone ad that begs users to click through to receive any actual interformation.

To get past the click through barrier, you can make an ad interactive. But the challenge then becomes actually getting users to engage with said interactive ad. Interactive ads are still sometimes seen as not safe to click on. If users don't want to click off to a different site, they wont click at all unless they feel safe.

That's where navigation systems come in.

Using a familiar UI pattern tells users, "This ad is safe to play with." When applied correctly, common navigation systems can boost both the amount of content or storytelling within the ad, and also the user's willingness to engage at all.

Here are 5 of the most common and effective.

Flat-screen televisions were the big-ticket purchases that many families made to upgrade their entertainment experiences at home. At least several years ago. Times change. Only twelve years ago, the way to Liv Tyler's character's heart in One Night at McCool's was a DVD player (not even a Blu-Ray player, mind you).

Coupled with the rapid pace of technological obsolescence are changing media consumption patterns. Television viewing through the traditional small screen is slightly declining, while media consumption--including of television shows--is rapidly growing on even smaller screens: PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Children's programming and even primetime shows are debuting via the Internet ahead of broadcast. Oh, how the mighty (television screens) have fallen.

As audiences move to a multi-screen experience with media, what are the implications for campaign management and performance measurement? According to a recently published study commissioned by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Nielsen, there are plenty.

Within the shift from using Flash to HTML5 for rich media, advertisers are gaining access to a lot of great capabilities. One of them is the ability to use SVG formatted graphics for razor-sharp, resolution-independent images that look great on all screens (even Retina devices).

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It's a graphic format with some big advantages. Curious about when and why to use SVG? Read on.

You've probably heard of the term "HTML5" recently, but what does it mean for marketers? Between managing campaigns, creating content, and keeping a pulse on consumer insights, it can be hard to carve out time to understand issues that fall outside the immediate realm of marketing. But it's important to be aware of industry changes that can impact marketing strategy and implementation. Given the increasing presence of digital as a channel, it's worthwhile to have a basic understanding of what HTML5 is in a nutshell.

HTML5 is a browser-based programming language used for structuring and presenting content online. It makes your content more accessible and interactive because it offers an app-like interface and is compatible with mobile devices.

Why is this important? Given that users are increasingly interacting with content on different screens — switching between mobile, tablets, and desktop — the idea of being able to "build once, run anywhere" is key. It saves time and resources from having to build several versions of an ad, for instance, to run on each device.

In April, 2010, Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” post marked the end of the desktop/Flash era and the beginning of the HTML5/device era. Jobs argued that Flash’s proprietary technology stack failed to meet the needs of a “touch”, open, and “full web” world. Jobs predicted that HTML5 marked the future of the industry and would win the device and desktop world.  Three and half years earlier in 2006, Google launched Docs, a seminal moment in moving desktop applications to the cloud. Seven years later, millions of former Office users rely on Google.  A new generation of consumers will never use a desktop-based word processor or spreadsheet.

Flite announces today access to Design Studio HTML5, the best real-time HTML5 design tool for multi-screen ad development in the cloud. With the capacity to design creatives that render in today's browser and app environments—and across the array of modern devices, including computers, tablets and smartphones—Design Studio HTML5 makes the future of ad creative development available today.

It’s no secret that digital content is now consumed using a combination of computers, smartphones, tablets and TVs. 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.

While brands look toward the promise of being able to reach consumers wherever they are, they are also faced with an unprecedented level of complexity. Here are three key themes to better understand the opportunities and challenges that advertisers face in a multi-screen world.