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. 

When you first started doing content marketing, you were probably itching to get started tackling the mountain of topics you wanted to cover. Soon, you probably realized that creating a steady stream of content is more difficult than it seemed. And maybe you felt like you already exhausted everything you could possibly discuss in a blog post, video, or tweet.

The reality is that there are virtually unlimited things you can write about. But you do have to be creative. The solution is different for every brand, which is why starting with questions is an organic way to find a solution that works for you. 

The next major trend in display advertising is to bring branded content into ads. This allows consumers to interact with content — like recipes or news articles — directly in ads, thus circumventing the elusive clickthrough as a KPI. In order to do this, marketers must create content, then find a way to make the process of bringing the content into ads repeatable and scalable.

Even before the ad creation process starts, creating content — to pull into ads or otherwise — is difficult in itself. According to a 2013 survey by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 64% of marketers are challenged with producing enough content, 52% with producing the kind of content, and 45% with producing a variety of content.

Brands are building a great presence on social networks and are looking for ways of making their quality content more accessible for consumers.

While social media has grown dramatically in terms of brand spend in the past ten years, the idea of incorporating social media into paid media -- via online ads -- is still fairly new. However, social media is not a tactic that stands alone from advertising campaigns, and therefore benefits from being integrated into an overall media plan and enhanced by paid media placements.

There is one day each year when people actually like ads: during the Superbowl. Now that that's over, most people have gone back to ignoring ads.

And yet, paid media is still the best way to get your brand message out to millions of people in a scalable, consistent way. After working with an extensive base of Fortune 500 companies -- Shell, Kraft, Charles Schwab — and publishers — Rolling Stones, Glam.com, FoodNetwork.com — we've found that there are themes that successful advertising campaigns have in common.

If you want to increase your chances of having consumers like your ads, read on.

1. Let them have content.

Don’t force users to click on an ad in order to access brand content. In the old days, online ads consisted of a static image and text. Now, technology allows brands to pull forward content that was originally only on your landing page, that now can live directly in the ad unit itself. 

The birth of television over 50 years ago kicked off the trend of viewing media on small screens. Today, 90% of American media consumption is done on screens totaling over 4 hours spent daily across phones, tablets, TVs, and laptops.

If we look at smartphones alone, we are currently at 56% penetration in the US. It makes sense that advertisers are increasingly viewing mobile as not only an experimental part of the budget, but as a valid force of its own. In fact, an August 2013 eMarketer study estimates that mobile will capture almost half of total digital ad spend in North America by 2017. Indeed, mobile usage is rapidly taking over as a standard way of life. 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.

Nowadays it has become standard practice to gather and measure information about how people are interacting with your company's products.

This helps with anything from testing creative concepts to demonstrating the ROI of marketing. But there is another type of data that you may not be as familiar with, that provides an additional layer of insight to understanding customers. It is called event analytics, and it is one of the most powerful ways to gather and measure information.

Event analytics is a term that refers to the various events that are triggered by interacting with software, and the interesting things that those events can tell us.

For example, every time someone loads a web page, swipes on a mobile app, takes a digital photo, sends a text message, or fills out a form, there is a software event that is triggered to make that happen. In a person’s everyday interaction with mobile phones, tablets, and computers, they can create hundreds -- or even thousands -- of these events. Event analytics is about capturing those events, as well as the unique properties related to how and why they were created, and then using them to measure and learn things.

Flite is proud to announce that our clients, Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) and Kellogg Company, won the prestigious Portada Award for "Top Hispanic Digital Advertising Campaign and Execution" at the 7th Annual Hispanic Advertising and Media Conference.

The content-driven advertising campaign included three different versions of both Spanish and English language creatives across multiple ad sizes for desktop and mobile. The ad units were updated throughout the five-month campaign, using Flite agile marketing technology to showcase fresh news and apply real-time insights to display ads.