New eBook: Mobile Native Advertising

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New eBook: Mobile Native Advertising

Native advertising continues to make substantial inroads across a wide range of publishers; even some previously resistant pubs, like the New York Times, have gotten on board. Their success has prompted rapid migration onto mobile screens as well, providing some hope to mobile publishers and app developers who had until recently struggled to extract meaningful value from their smartphone and tablet inventory.

While the earliest mobile native pioneers have been the largest social networks—Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn organize their content into feeds that lend themselves well to the story-driven native placements we profiled in our eBook on native advertising—other prominent publishers and app developers have also successfully made the leap. 

In an eBook that we are debuting today, Mobile Native Advertising, we take a look at 13 social networks and publishers, in both mobile web and app form, that represent the state of mobile native advertising today.

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Altimeter Group Report: The Content Marketing Software Landscape

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Altimeter Group Report: The Content Marketing Software Landscape

Considering content marketing's enormous scope—$44 billion according to a comprehensive estimate by the Custom Content Council—it's no surprise that a large range of software and platform solutions have emerged to help scale marketers' workflows. Altimeter Group, a tech research and consulting firm, has just released a report on the landscape of content marketing software vendors that provides context to the various service segments.

The report begins with the premise that platform/tool selection is a difficult proposition. Vendors' offerings are highly differentiated and present a wide range of capabilities that might not be relevant to all marketers' needs. The report's author, Rebecca Lieb, suggests that evolution in the space will drive consolidation and the formation of end-to-end solutions incorporating capabilities from content creation to compliance within the next two years. 

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TV and Social Media: a Chicken-and-Egg Problem

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TV and Social Media: a Chicken-and-Egg Problem

NBC Universal's President of Research and Media Development, Alan Wurtzel, made waves a couple of days ago in an interview with the Financial Times when he claimed that social media "is not a game changer yet" in driving television viewing. The revelation was a bit of a shock to those of us who regularly see hashtags planted in the corner of our favorite television shows, and assumed that we were the only ones not tweeting at every discussion-worthy plot twist.

As it turns out, Wurtzel drew his conclusions based on the Winter Olympics, which NBC had exclusive rights to broadcast. Across the 1500+ hours of coverage over 18 days, his team's research found that approx 3 million unique users, or about 19% of the television viewing audience, posted 10.6 million Tweets, and around 20 million people somehow engaged with Olympics-related commentary on Facebook. His conclusion? Popular shows drive social media activity, not the other way around.

Not everyone agrees with his conclusion. 

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New eBook: Beyond the Feed - Extending Social Media Marketing into Paid Media

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No one in the digital advertising space has missed the explosion of social media activity by large brands over the past few years, particularly during major media and sporting events when everyone's eyes are shuttling between their television and their phone or tablet. After every year's Oscars and Super Bowl, the advertising world is abuzz with chatter about which social media forays garnered outsized attention for brands (think Oreo at the Super Bowl in 2013 and Arby's at the Grammys this year). Brands with an impeccable sense of timing and creative smarts earn well-deserved kudos.

What's discussed less is how many brands are effectively playing a zero-sum game by limiting their social media campaigns to the social media platforms themselves. Facebook has been rumored to be putting a slow squeeze on the organic reach of Pages. And taking in event-day Tweets can be a little like trying to sip from a firehose; often only the most catchy ones rise above the fray.

With this growing development in mind, we have published a free eBook, Beyond the Feed: Extending Social Media Marketing into Paid Media. The book specifically addresses:

  • Real-world examples of brands "doing social right."
  • Capabilities of display ads with social media content and functionality.
  • How brands can amplify their social media investments off-platform.

We hope the eBook provides fuel for thought and discussion as marketers look to amplify the impact of successes in social media.

What Native Programmatic Needs to Scale

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What Native Programmatic Needs to Scale

Flite Co-Founder and President of Product and Technology Giles Goodwin authored a "Data-Driven Thinking" column for AdExchanger on the promise of native advertising, and how both media buyers and sellers will have to give up a bit more control in the process in order to achieve scale.

Native advertising has grown by leaps and bounds, but why hasn’t it knocked out the lowly banner? It has not reached scale, whereas banner advertising, whether direct or via RTB, enjoys almost limitless application and scope. Programmatic has only reduced friction and enhanced targeting. Native ads might be worth caring about, but the lack of scalability has rendered them a niche player.

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Mobile Video Native Advertising: the Imminent Juggernaut

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Mobile Video Native Advertising: the Imminent Juggernaut

Several parallel developments are underway that are setting the stage for mobile video native advertising to make an outsized impact on the digital ad space in the coming years.

  • Native advertising continues to grow. eMarketer is projecting $3.1 billion in spend this year, a 29% increase over 2013's $2.4 billion. The Wall Street Journal and mobile news app Circa are among the latest publishers announcing the move to native.
  • Consumers are increasingly watching video on mobile. Smartphones' larger, higher-res screens, coupled with better (read: 4G) mobile data bandwidth, have made video consumption on mobile more tenable. According to Business Insider, mobile's share of online video has jumped from 4% at the start of 2012 to over 14% at the close of 2013. Cisco claims that this amounted to 53% of total mobile data traffic.
  • There's greater appetite for longer-form video. As viewers are more apt to watch full episode- and movie-length video, their tolerance for 30- to 60-second video spots typical for television grows. As one such measure, ads for video content longer than 20 minutes grew 86% YOY, while the same for short- (less than 5 minutes) and medium-length clips (5-20 minutes) saw ad views grow by a more modest 22% and 13%, respectively (source: FreeWheel).
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CONTENT@SCALE: a 2-minute video introduction and demo

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CONTENT@SCALE: a 2-minute video introduction and demo

Along with our partner Starcom MediaVest Group, Flite launched CONTENT@SCALE, the next-generation platform for curating and distributing licensed content from premium publishers into display ads in real-time, at CES in early January. The program enjoyed terrific reactions from the press, and it's grown in leaps and bounds since then, with many more publishers adding their content to our ever-expanding library. A number of brand clients have also kicked off successful campaigns using the service.

If you're intrigued by CONTENT@SCALE and would like to know a bit more about how it works at a practical level, check out this newly-released video that explains what it offers participating advertisers and how the interface works in concert with the Flite Design Studio.

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Case Studies: Kellogg's Frosted Flakes Finds Scale for Content in Paid Media

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Case Studies: Kellogg's Frosted Flakes Finds Scale for Content in Paid Media

We recently published a case study that underscores the ability of content-rich ads to amplify and extend the impact of brand messages.

In the profiled campaign, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, eager to connect with Hispanic mothers, worked with agency Starcom MediaVest Group and publisher MamásLatinas to create interactive ads with embedded videos and article content that would resonate with Latina mothers interested in ideas for family activities. Leveraging the unique set of capabilities in the Flite Platform, Kellogg's updated their in-market ad units with fresh content on a regular basis, and, as an agile marketing best practice, included comments and responses to ads shared in social media within ad updates themselves.

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