Thoughts on digital advertising from hot tech startup BannerFlow

As part of our brand newsroom partnership with Mynewsdesk, we've offered all ad:tech exhibitors the chance to blog in our online newsroom. First up is Emma Cullen from BannerFlow - a hot new digital advertising startup based in Stockholm with presence in Sweden, USA, UK and Germany. 

In a nut shell, BannerFlow allow businesses, advertisers, agencies and designers to create and manage large volumes of HTML5 banners in different languages, quickly and without a design team. BannerFlow strives to make display advertising more streamlined and cost-effective so that businesses can focus more time on new business and spend less time on banner production.

To kick us off, what's the biggest challenge in digital advertising today?

Currently the biggest challenge is to produce display ads for mobile devices. In the past few years we have seen a massive shift from people using desktop computers to mobile devices as their primary form of internet access. This has presented a problem whereby display ads that are created with Flash simply cannot be viewed on mobile devices. Or not clear enough. We've been working hard to solve this problem. We now enable businesses to simply create mobile-friendly HTML5 banners.

What opportunities does this present for digital marketers today? 

Digital advertising has a much wider reach than traditional print advertising. Tools such as BannerFlow allows marketers to scale up their ad campaigns across multiple countries and languages at the click of a button. This could never have been done with traditional print advertising.

Organisations now have the opportunity to advertise globally no matter how big or small they are. Digital advertising is also more effective than traditional advertising. This is mainly due to the ease of measuring success of ad campaigns through various tracking tools. For example, you can measure how effective your display advertisement is through using eye-tracking tools and heat maps to see where viewers are looking on a web page. Being able to measure how effective advertising is helps organisations become more successful. It is now easier than ever to see what works and what doesn’t work, which of course helps brands boost sales.

In your opinion, what does the future for display advertising look like? 

Well, we'll see an increase in wearable technology such as smart watches, and also an increase of "Internet of Things" such as smart fridges, for example. Wearable technology lends itself naturally to display advertising. In the future, we'll likely have access to data that'll enable us to be real targeted with advertising. For instance market to consumers' smart watches with latest refreshments on the menu or deals in-store as they pass a nearby coffee shop.

This might be the same for other smart products. For example, your smart fridge will know when you’re low on milk, allowing supermarkets to target display ads based on this data. These types of products are not yet mainstream, but in time we'll understand how consumers will use such products and to what extent we can use them for advertising.

For businesses, the future of display advertising lies in creating more effective advertising solutions, like what we're already doing. Businesses do not want to wait weeks for their advertising campaign to be ready to go live in a media world where we're expected to react quickly.

How does BannerFlow intend to help marketing professionals in the ad realm? 

Traditionally, designing and creating banner ads take weeks, but BannerFlow has cut production time by up to 95%, making it possible to have an idea at breakfast and go to market by lunchtime. BannerFlow also allows businesses to take advantage of unexpected opportunities by allowing the real-time editing of banners, which was impossible before. Other features include feeder data, which enables businesses to feed data into their banner ads. This is particularly helpful for displaying different products, prices and has even been used to provide real time sport scores.

Visit BannerFlow in the Innovation Lab at IL-B during ad:tech London on 21 - 22nd October 2014. Fredrik Rubin, Head of Sales at BannerFlow will be holding a seminar titled ‘Changing the rules of the banner creation game’ at 15.20pm on 21st October in Seminar Theatre 1.