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.