Many of the most popular destinations on the Internet depend on advertising revenue as their sole or main source of revenue. Consequently, it is critical to the long-term health of these businesses that the advertising on their sites be effective. Flite is an innovative, new style of advertisement that gives marketers and brand managers more tools with which to tell their stories and promises to deliver more engagement with potential customers.
"We like to call what we do cloud-based advertising, and the market we play in is display advertising," explains Will Price, CEO of Flite. "Display advertising is a 17-year-old technology, and it's really asked marketers to try to tell their story with three attributes—the right image, the right advertising and the right call to action button. Our perspective is that the Internet over the last 17 years has gotten so rich—there's APIs, there's social marketing, there's video—and what we're trying to do is use the cloud to bring the full power of today's Internet to bear directly in an ad unit, so when a brand tells a story it can tell a story with a pollen count, movie showtime lookups, social connections [for example]...Flite allows brands to tell stories with the full palette of assets that they produce...and make ads that are transformative in terms of the engagement that they can deliver."
Currently, marketers often use banner ads to drive audiences to information-rich landing pages, which introduce new products. These pages contain videos, white papers, lead generation forms and other items to engage the audience. Flite takes all the information contained on the landing page and puts it into an ad unit that can be served across the web, allowing the audience to engage with the ad within the context of their original destination.
"What we're offering that publisher," says Price, "is to bring the best of that brand presence directly into the publisher's context...where it's not about leaving; it's about engaging directly right there on-page...Instead of building a content page and driving people to it, you bring the content to the people."
Changing the creative using Flite is much simpler than changing a traditional ad online. Rather than re-compiling the file, generating the new ad tags and distributing the ad tags again, with Flite, you simply change the ad and hit publish. All the ad tags in the field are automatically updated. It also allows you to easily run multiple versions of an ad and use the system's analytics to determine which ads are most effective.
"We aspire to give you almost Omniture class web analytics," says Price, "that allow the marketer to say, 'Wow, this ad really did engage, and not only was it engaging, it turned out that the video component was most interesting.' Or, 'You know what, the white papers really worked and they were downloaded X number of times.' So the metrics the industry is thinking about, clickthrough rate, really become antiquated...it's about engagement."
More info:
Flite web page: http://www.flite.com/
Flite blog: http://www.flite.com/blog/
Flite profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/flite
Flite on Twitter: http://twitter.com/flite
