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Here is a sample of the insights this webinar will explore:

• How marketing content can find new life in paid media placements
• How you can go beyond clickthrough, and instead focus on delivering meaningful value to advertisers
• How Paid Media Publishing allows your digital advertising to be as responsive and relevant as your social media
• How instant ad updates and real-time metrics allow continuous optimization without the need for new ad tags
• How to fully take advantage of high-impact Rising Star ad formats, at scale

We hope you can join us. Register today.

Speaker Giles Goodwin Giles Goodwin is the Co-founder and President of Product and Engineering at Flite. Giles has over 14 years experience in building innovative software products and managing computer technologies.

The last nine months have seen transformations from many of the web's top publishers with a focus on usability, aesthetics and content. It's quite remarkable. 

Like butterflies coming out of their cocoons, many sites are shaking off their functional past and heading into an elegant future.

A few key characteristics are shared across this transformation.

Responsive, touch-friendly design

Time.com claimed the title as the the first global news site to roll out a fully responsive redesign optimized for mobile and tablet browsing last fall.

2013 has been said to be "the Year of Responsive Design."

Streamzoo.com

Legend has it that if you visit the Facebook corporate headquarters, you'll see a sign painted on the wall.

It says: "Done is better than perfect."

Sounds easy, right? Maybe not. At least, not for a brand manager like you, who has millions of dollars of brand equity on the line.

Many large companies might agree that the idea of getting something out quickly is interesting in theory but risky in practice, per the quote below from Fast Company.

Our newest case study, which profiles Flite customer Livingly Media, explores the Livingly Media design team's experience using Flite to turn around high-impact display ads for their clients quickly. Jorge Reyna, Livingly Media's design director, describes how the intuitive interface and sensible action scripting allow designers to support multiple campaigns at the same time, something that wasn't possible using traditional Flash ad development environments.

Today we are extremely excited to be announcing our new partnership with VivaKi, the global leader in digital advertising solutions.

This milestone event extends the successful relationship we’ve had with Starcom MediaVest Group out to the entire VivaKi family of agencies.

This also coincides with a round of investment lead by Iris Capital — the investment joint venture of Publicis Groupe and Orange Telecom — which had participation from all of our existing investors.

“Next Generation Storytelling is a key focus for Publicis Groupe, and Flite will allow our clients to publish content and tell stories that leverage social, mobile and API's, and do so in a cost effective and agile way.”

— Rishad Tobaccowala, VivaKi Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer

We look forward to enabling the Publicis Groupe agencies to create and scale new brand experiences in online advertising. It's a true validation of our vision of an internet with more meaningful, more effective advertising.

Read the full press release here.

Most of all, publishers are increasingly focused on having content take center-stage. With this shift, publishers are rethinking what immersive content and advertising experiences could look like.

Here are a few trends that we're seeing from forward-thinking publishers.

1. Focus on individual articles instead of homepages.

Five or ten years ago, publisher websites were all about the homepage. A user would have Yahoo! set as their default browser homepage and see text news, a carousel of photos with headlines, and consume content in a fairly canned way.

Learning is fun. So is content. (Image credit: Flickr, woodleywonderworks)

Some of the best marketing ideas today are about content marketing.

Through content, marketers provide value to consumers, and hopefully get their business as well. It’s something everyone can feel good about.

But it’s popular for content marketers to disparage online advertising these days.

There is this thinking that advertising and content marketing are disparate ideas — standing in polar opposition to each other — as if inbound, value-driven content, and outbound advertising don’t mix well.

The idea that ads online have to cater to a kind of attention deficit theatre is something we’ve artificially imposed upon ourselves.

Think for a minute. What is a display ad, really?

It’s a rectangle, in front of an online audience, that you can buy.

Now you can put (with some restrictions like file size or decency) whatever you like in this rectangle.

It could be an eye-catching animation about your latest promotion.

Or it could be a funny video. Or a recipe. Maybe a how-to article.

Yes, that’s right. You can put content marketing in ads.

But unlike standard, non-advertised content, you’re probably exposing new people to this content. In ads, you aren’t restricted to only your existing web traffic.

Margot Bloomstein said last week at Confab Minneapolis (the Content Strategy Conference),

“The right content slows down users, focuses their attention, and helps them act deliberately...Users can appreciate slow experiences: they’re engaged, anticipating, creating memories.”

The right ad content slows down users too. It engages with them on a whole different level than an animation.

I’m not saying don’t do display campaigns with catchy animations. They do serve a business purpose — creating awareness — even if clickthrough rates hover around 0.08%.

But if you want to engage with new audiences and create memories, don’t be shy. Take a note from content marketing and create some content-rich ads.

In advertising, you own the rectangle. It’s up to you to decide what to do with it.

Source: jcrew.com

A best practice in social media is to avoid talking only about yourself. That's the old way of media: one-sided, push-driven, no dialogue, self-serving.

But how do you talk about yourself and your product? Luckily, there are ways to do this without being off-putting.

When creating content, it's important to keep in mind what your users want most: relevance. They want your advertising, marketing, and content to be useful.

If you offer relevant information and context, it provides leeway to talk about yourself without violating the new norm of two-way conversations in digital marketing.

Here are 4 ways to do this.

Given their ability to scale across digital media, display ads are excellent vehicles for propagating important announcements to online audiences. Ads can alert consumers to upcoming sales, events, and important deadlines. And one of the most effective ways to get a user's attention and convey the urgency of an upcoming date and time is through the use of a countdown clock.

Naturally, as dynamic elements, countdown clocks can't be configured to run in static files. However, using a platform like Flite, in which ads can be configured to run new functionality or content on the fly, it's a simple matter of inserting the countdown clock component into an ad unit.

Using the Flite Ad Studio, there are a few simple steps involved:

In many ways they’re right.  U.S. Internet users spend three times longer on social media and blogs than email today. And social media use has seen a 356% increase since 2006. 

But in other ways, we’re just at the beginning of figuring out this social media thing and learning ways to use it to best realize its potential as a scalable and personal communications channel.

Let’s take a look at the current state of what we’ve been able to achieve with social media marketing and trends that indicate where it may be headed in the future. 

Social Media Posting

Current State: Heavy on Media, Light on Social 

Today’s social media marketing has a tendency to be high on media but low on social. All too often corporate feeds read more like a series of direct-mail subject lines than conversation prompts.

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