As Halloween approaches, marketers must be cautious to remember the tales of woe from the bad display ad campaigns of the past. Otherwise the ideas behind those failed campaigns may rise again to terrify users all over the web.

Protect your audience and ask yourself — are these scary creatures lurking beneath your advertising?

We've still got a few more days in the month, but Halloween's candy culture has invaded our office early this year, so I'm going to post this before I fall into a sugar coma. If you too have begun trick-or-treating a bit earlier and missed out on the most popular blog posts for the month, here's a recap for you.

5. What Device Proliferation Means for Publisher Ad Revenue
The multi-screen reality that publishers and advertisers are coming to terms with isn't forthcoming, it's already here. Rob's post points to some sobering figures that should be a warning against complacency, as well as some important implications for decision making among the various digital advertising approaches that marketers have to choose from.

Advertisers should love smartphone proliferation.

Being able to funnel brand storytelling into a portable computer that most people keep within 5 feet of themselves at all times seems amazing. And with US smartphone penetration having exceeded 50%, we’re now living in a multi-screen majority. The time is ripe for really connecting with users via interactive rich media on their most personal devices.

But one of the chief problems with smartphone proliferation for advertisers is a reliance on Flash. When Flash ads are served to environments that don’t support it—which is most devices—the result is a broken ad experience.

However, to handle the new mobile world order advertisers are moving toward developing ads with HTML5.

Effective content marketers pull from a variety of skill sets and functions in order to regularly create content that's interesting and informative, and ultimately benefits the business. Here are five job functions that content marketing teams should draw upon and have a solid understanding of to take their content to a new level.

Community management

Building, growing, and nurturing an online community requires a deep understanding of customers and what they care about. Similarly, content marketing is about adding value by creating information that is relevant to your audience. Content marketers can take inspiration from community managers by thinking about creating a conversation that engages users and encourages them to participate via comments, sharing, or "likes" on social media.

Multi-screen advertising isn’t just the future anymore—it’s a necessity—happening at this very moment, here, in the present.

But, just 5 years ago Apple launched the iPhone, you say. And the iPad is only 3 years old. That’s really not that long ago. Could the mobile-apocalypse already be upon us?

Yes. Yes it can.

Phone and tablet proliferation has been so widespread that this year in April we reached a multi-screen majority. More people are now using multiple devices than just a single device. And 57% of the time when we’re using a smartphone, we’re also using another device at the same time.

Hidden interests, subtle patterns - these studies are best researched and adjusted to in the agile marketing environment. Based on internal learnings, we suggest the following best practices when putting together an advertising campaign undergirded by agile marketing principles.

The design process of every campaign with a general set of principles which focus on ensuring that the creative is aligned with the proper key performance indicators (KPI). Below is a short list of items to always keep in mind while evaluating the creative.

I’m often asked about the differences between traditional, consumer packaged goods marketing and e-commerce, startup marketing. It’s true: the day-to-day marketing I engage in today is very different from that of my CPG days. But that’s not to say that the world in which I grew up is obsolete. I’m a better marketer for having spent almost a decade in a traditional blue chip training ground, and I marry the two worlds daily in my current role.

Consumer packaged goods companies and marketing have been around for many years (as in 100+). Although the tactical plans have evolved, many of the fundamentals remain the same. These companies have a healthy growth target of 3-5% of annual sales (a pretty steep number off a base in the multi-billions).  Contrast this with the remarkable double (and often triple) digit growth of e-commerce startups; the runway may be shorter, but the climb is faster.

Are you still doing destination advertising?

Do you continuously run ads that force the user to click through to a destination before you deliver something of value?

Or do you use your rich media as an opportunity to provide users with an experience right in the ad?

Traditional banner advertising — what I’m calling “destination advertising” here — relies on heavily on clicks to send a user to a destination. Clicks have been documented time and time again to be a really poor indicator of engagement. It’s not that people don’t like your brand or product. They just don’t like clicking on ads.

Our main office's close proximity to Moscone Center makes our participation at the upcoming HTML5 Developer Conference and Global Mobile Internet Conference all that much easier. We're excited to host booths in each conference's exhibition hall. Come by to see how the Flite Platform simplifies the development of innovative HTML5 ad creative for today's multi-screen world!

Content marketing can be an overwhelming topic to learn about. So let's take a look at the topic with a more visual approach. Here is a roundup of our favorite Slideshare decks that cover different components of content marketing.

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There's a lot of junk being produced out there. Ever since content marketing became popular, it's been used an abused. So let's agree on what BS is and how to avoid it, so that we commit to only producing quality content.

Although there's a tremendous range of innovative web application components that one can embed in display ads nowadays (TRUSTe's AdChoices is one we recently added to the Flite Platform, for instance), it's important to not overlook the most popular ones for their wide applicability and broad resonance with users.

A few months ago, I attended a marketing bootcamp hosted by Sequoia Capital. It was an all-day, invitation-only event with speakers and discussions with fellow amazing B2C and B2B startups. One of my favorite presentations was by Othman Laraki, former VP of product and growth at Twitter. 

Othman shared his wisdom about a range of topics, but there was one piece of advice that was particularly memorable: You want your product to become part of the user's habit and part of their routine.

Many of today's most successful consumer products are designed to trigger automatic behaviors that re-engage users without prompt. The idea of understanding user habits isn't new, but it's growing in importance and is often referred to as the habit startup.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting shorter and the most consistent source of light are our computer and phone screens. Fortunately, days will start getting longer again in less than three months, but we're appreciating the additional screentime, at least on our blog. We enjoyed lots of readers in September, and while views were spread across a wide range of posts, old and new, these five posts below boasted the highest popularity among our readers.