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.