Today, AOL announced Project Devil. Project Devil is AOL’s effort to redefine display advertising and to enable a creative canvas that both leverages the richness of today’s real time web and drives material increases in end-user engagement.
AOL’s new ads are more like applications that support live updates from Twitter and Facebook, video, photo galleries, store finders, and other app like functions that help move the industry beyond old, boring banners.
At Flite, we could not be more excited to see and read about AOL’s new plans. One year ago last week, we signed LinkedIn as our first Flite customer. Flite’s vision is to transform display ads into live apps programmed by the best of today’s real time and interactive web. For example, below is an Halo ad that includes video, real time content updates, and delivers on the very vision promised by AOL’s Project Devil and AppAds.
The news is fabulous for several key reasons. First, it affirms our vision that display advertising is moving from static flash files to living apps programmed by APIs, data, and multi-media assets. Second, it underscores a critical shift in the value chain. Publishers are no longer content to simply sell audiences and to flight standard IAB ads against said audience. No, today publishers must differentiate by productizing ad innovation and finding ways to integrate the best of advertiser, publisher, and social content and functions. Advertisers, in turn, in their search for higher engagement and banner ad dollar ROI, are willing to work directly with large publishers on custom size units.
Flite proudly partners with the web’s best publishers to realize both goals - new ad formats that drive 10x improvements in engagement and new business models that allow publishers to win more business by delivering more value.
As Google says, watch this space. An $8bn market is up for grabs!