The New York Times and other publishers are on the leading edge of creative optimization of advertising formats, a sign that “creative matters now and people are excited about it,” says Flite CEO and Co-Founder Giles Goodwin.

Even as marketers spend $3.71 billion on programmatic media buys this year, consumers’ eyeballs remain elusive. Major players like Apple have introduced ad blockers for devices that effectively allow consumers to ignore pricey display ads.

In the digital advertising space, all we seemed to hear about for most of 2013 and 2014 was the ubiquitous term “programmatic.” Media agencies, brand marketers, ad tech companies and publishers all scrambled to define and understand what, for many, was a hard-to-grasp concept, especially for those with long tenures in the industry.

Not for nothing has Barack Obama been called our first social media president. During his 2012 presidential run, his campaign spent $47 million on digital campaigning (10 times more than Mitt Romney’s $4.7 million).

That huge investment turned out to be worth it—he won.
Thanks to him, today’s presidential candidates can’t ignore the power of social media. Headlines around the country shout that the 2016 election will be duked out over Instagram, or Snapchat or Twitter.

Display advertising had almost been written off when native advertising made its mark against a backdrop of controversy.

While commentators wrangled over how wide a church-state gap was necessary between advertiser and editorial to skirt ethical issues, both advertisers and publishers assiduously collaborated on native campaigns for one simple reason: They work. By creating advertising that suits the consumption patterns, functionality, topical focus and format of its context, advertisers gave users substantial reason to engage.

Not much has been said about Atlas since Facebook purchased the advertising suite from Microsoft last year. However, a new partnership with cloud-based cross-platform advertising company Flite could help Facebook advertisers deliver better results off the site.

Flite announced Wednesday that the company has partnered with Atlas to offer customers an innovative new solution for display advertising. The Flite Design Studio, which specializes in real-time content advertising, will be integrated into Atlas’ ad-server solution.

Ad server and measurement platform Atlas Solutions, which Facebook acquired from Microsoft last February, announced an integration with cloud-based multiscreen advertising company Flite’s Flite Design Studio, as well as its selection of Innovid as its technology platform to deliver video advertising.

Flite became one of the first companies to integrate with Atlas via a direct application-programming interface, and Atlas advertisers will now have access to Flite Design Studio and its Web-based design tools for building HTML5 and Flash ads for desktop and mobile.

Rich media platform Flite is partnering with Atlas to allow advertisers using the ad-serving and measurement service to more easily create ads that run across multiple screens.
 
Under the agreement, Flite is integrating its browser-based Design Studio platform for building HTML5 ads that work across desktop and mobile screens into the ad-server using the Atlas API (application programming interface). Besides providing more ad creative options, the aim is to simplify the workflow from ad development to analytics.

Facebook hasn't said much about Atlas in the year since buying it, but it has been making incremental tweaks to the product. Today it took a bigger step, launching a creative partner program with rich media vendors Innovid and Flite. The deal will let Atlas's agency customers more easily integrate rich media into their campaigns, both from a trafficking and reporting standpoint.

According to Erik Johnson, the Facebook executive in charge of Atlas, the deal "signals to the marketplace our partner friendly approach to the broader ecosystem." Future partner integrations are likely to be announced around search and analytics, Johnson said, but he declined to go into details.

I am a huge fan of Flite and its CEO, Will Price, due to the company’s ability to add what is really needed for premium programmatic to take “Flite,” which is content and context.

In the past, publishers created economic value by aggregating audiences around a certain demographic or context. Price says that RTB is changing all of this. “RTB is allowing marketers to shift from audiences that are aggregated by context, i.e. publisher domain, to synthetically stitching together an audience across thousands of publishers,” explains Price.

This scenario has put a lot of pressure on publishers. “It's clearly created a huge opportunity for marketers, who can buy audiences very efficiently, to be much more confident of the quality of the audience they're building in terms of being intentionally an audience they care about,” explains Price. Rather than just targeting someone who's on a page and inferring from that page presence, now brands can use mechanisms to make sure that the customer has the intention to do business or exhibits an expected behavior. “This allows marketers to effectively build audience, to do it at a much lower price point, and to be able to flex their buy a little bit,” remarks Price.

Real-time Marketings Gets Real

Social media continues to speed the pace of our everyday conversations, whether about breaking news, fitness or our plans for the upcoming weekend. And now a next-generation platform from Starcom MediaVest Group called CONTENT@SCALE will enable marketers to access and publish relevant content in digital media—as quickly as these conversations are taking place. 

During the launch of CONTENT@SCALE at CES, Flite CEO Will Price sat down with Beet.tv founder Andy Plesser and explained why marketers need to shift from a planning mindset to one of reacting to the immediate contexts of customers' lives, and how CONTENT@SCALE makes an agile approach to distributing brand content through paid channels possible.

Flite's new Design Studio HTML5 is an online tool for creating web ads and appears to be a direct competitor to Google's Web Designer. I've reviewed Google Web Designer, so I wanted to give Design Studio HTML5 a go as well.

Here's how to use the tool, along with my thoughts on whether I recommend it. All screen captures in this review are from Chrome v. 31.0.1650.57 m unless otherwise noted.

New digital advertising conventional wisdom: Banner ads are dead!*

But native ads, which use “content” that’s supposed to look like “real” content — those are cool and new!**

One big problem in turning this conventional wisdom into reality: It’s hard to scale “native” ads, because someone has to go create the “content” for them. And if you did that every time you wanted to run a native ad, then that process would be just as cumbersome as actually … creating content!

There are a bunch of folks trying to tackle this, of course, because solving it seems like a lucrative thing to do. Here’s one version: A new program from Starcom MediaVest Group, which lets advertisers create ads using stuff that real publishers — like Forbes, Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Time Inc. — have already published.

The offering, built using software from ad tech startup Flite, gives advertisers a library of stuff to choose from that has already been published, identified by different categories — perhaps you’re pushing shampoo, and want a piece about the benefits of essential oils — and lets them plunk an excerpt from the articles directly into a display ad.

Flite CEO was interviewed, along with 18 other experts in the advertising industry, about native advertising. The in-depth article on CPC Strategy Blog explores question such as: Who will benefit the most from native ad campaigns? How native ads are best implemented? What the future of native advertising will look like?

Will Price: As both audience buying becomes a fungible commodity and standard display ad performance suffers, publishers and platforms are looking to native ads to both differentiate their ad formats, which increase CPMs, while providing users in-line ad experiences that are contextually and graphically consistent with the publishers UI and UX.