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Millennials and women prefer independent labels to designer and luxury brands, according to a study by creative management platform Flite.
Twenty-three percent of women and millennials are likely to buy independent labels, compared to the 14 and 19 percent, respectively, which are apt to purchase luxury brands. Luxury brands are thus tasked with ensuring these consumers switch their preferences as income begins to increase.
Publishers and advertisers alike are looking for ways to offer readers engaging and less-interruptive experiences with native/branded content. Some are experimenting with different ad formats and sizes like the Immersion Unit developed by Flite, a creative management platform.
The New York Times started using Immersion Units late last year and the format has quickly evolved as a go-to format that the Timeshas incorporated into premium ad offerings.
As described by Flite, the units are designed to deliver content-rich native experiences with non-standard ad sizes. These in-stream ad units are helping publishers increase engagement rates.
Have you dipped into Facebook's Canvas yet? If not, it may be time to give it a whirl. Flite CEO Giles Goodwin offers some pro tips on how you can make the most of the quick-loading, interactive ad format.
Unless you’ve been on extended sabbatical, you’ve undoubtedly read countless articles portraying digital video as more or less the Holy Grail of digital publishing. Without a doubt, mobile and video are no longer distinct, discrete strategies per se, but rather must be integral to everything you do.
Just examining video alone, the benefits are all there – higher engagement, robust video completion rates (VCR) and a much-needed shot-in-the-arm of additional revenue for publishers. Video ads often see up to three times more engagement than display counterparts. However, monetizing video can be challenging, especially when you look at some of the revenue splits. For example, video creators on YouTube keep about 55% of ad revenues, while musicians earn about a 70% cut from platforms like Spotify and iTunes.
However, with a bit of restraint and guidance, digital video may just be the silver bullet you’ve been looking for. Let’s take a look at six potential strategies to get you beyond the obvious solutions, and make digital video work better for you.
We all know there’s something wrong with the digital advertising industry. But like children pointing fingers after a playground scuffle, we’re all sure the problem started with someone else.
Whether it’s ad fraud, viewability, ad blocking or any of today’s thorny industry problems, we all have one refrain: “It’s not my fault.” Brands and agencies whine that networks and exchanges aren’t doing enough to separate human viewers from bots. Publishers complain that nefarious traffic creates distrust and drives CPMs down.
So your company has decided to go the way of Unilever and "zero-base" its marketing budgets. You Google the term, and what you see gives you chills. For example, The Wall Street Journal calls zero-based budgeting "an arcane-sounding financial tool that slashes costs by focusing on details as minute as how to make photocopies."
Flite was originally founded in 2006, and rebranded from Widgetbox in 2011. Can you tell us a little more about the evolution of the company over the years and how you made the foray into creative management for marketers?
We started the company focused on connecting content producers with consumers across the web. Larger publishers started to use our platform to produce ads with a better user experience and that led us to our current business.
Advertisers, and the marketing campaigns they execute, are often categorised as either branding or performance, with completely different strategies and objectives. Giles Goodwin (pictured below), CEO, Flite, speaks to ExchangeWire about how marketing shouldn’t be viewed so parochially as branding or performance; but, instead, that we have the capabilities to be able to achieve both.
We in the digital advertising space like to think of our slice of the industry as forward-thinking, ahead-of-the-curve and superior to “traditional” advertising. We’ll even spout things like, “digital is no longer a consideration – everything is digital.”
OK, great, only every day, digital advertising fails to connect with consumers and falls further behind.
The reason is simple: user experience, or in digital parlance, UX.
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.
Limited creative has truly been the crux of ad blindness and ad blocking issues facing digital advertising today. As seen in AdWeek this morning, Giles shares his perspective on "Why the Humble Banner Ad is Not Dead", and how technological innovations around creative development will help improve digital advertising overall in the 21st century.
As the Web 2.0 tenets of usability and personalization have moved from aspiration to expectation across the Internet, Flash ads have become not only a user nuisance but a poor business decision for advertising stakeholders. Flash ads, previously an innovative method for exposing users to interactive, moving content instead of still images, ceased living up to their value prop around the time the last jewel-tone iMac “Flavour” was unplugged and put away. Recently, as Google’s Flash-blocking policy went into effect, Flash ads went from being unpopular to officially irrelevant.
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.
