THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO AGILE MARKETING IN DISPLAY pdf

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO AGILE MARKETING IN
DISPLAY ADS
Flite Inc.
Copyright 2013 by Flite Inc.
Smashwords Edition

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO AGILE MARKETING IN
DISPLAY ADS
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Why Adopt Agile Marketing?
- Benefits Of Agile Marketing
Chapter 2: What Are The Key Concepts In Agile Marketing?
- Prepare To Act Quickly
- Keep A Pulse On Trends
- Build Nimble Teams
- Make Updates In Real-time
- Iterate In Short Cycles
Chapter 3: How Agile Is Too Agile?
Chapter 4: How Do You Overcome “Banner Blindness” With
Agile Marketing?
- Causes Of Banner Blindness
- What Makes A Good Display Ad?
Chapter 5: What Are Examples Of Agile Marketing In Action?
- When Preparation Meets Opportunity: How To Stay Agile
During Unexpected News
- How To Test Ideas To Optimize Display Ads
Conclusion
Agile marketing is about taking small steps, minimizing risk, and
failing fast—all in an effort to figure out what works as efficiently
as possible.
As a methodology, it focuses on an iterative approach to planning

and executing, learning quickly, and having a bias towards action.
Agile marketing means listening to what your customer wants,
programming your ads to reflect relevant topics, updating, and
measuring.
So why does agile marketing matter in display advertising?
Because display is growing and marketers can’t afford to rely on
static text and image ads to meet ROI objectives. Forrester
Research predicts that interactive display media in the U.S. will
double between 2012 and 2017 to become a $28 billion industry,
one that is ripe to adopt the flexibility and real-time nature that
marketers have grown accustomed to with their social media.
With agile marketing in display ads, brands can update their ads in
real-time with the same ease that they update their Facebook pages
and Twitter feeds. This incremental approach allows marketers to
create relevant, timely marketing that matches the pace of the
evolving digital landscape.
Popular forms of online media—social, search, display—continue
to unfold at a lightning pace. Agile marketing is especially salient
in display advertising due to the broad reach, multitude of formats,
and endless variations in content type.
In this guide, we’ll examine the who, how, and why of agile
marketing, and demonstrate the enormous potential of adopting an
agile approach to display ad development.
Let’s dive in.
CHAPTER 1: WHY ADOPT AGILE MARKETING?
Today’s online consumer has unparalleled access to information,
products, and entertainment. Content is presented in a never-
ending stream that often leaves little time for exploration. Since
everything on the web is fleeting, what captures the attention of the

audience is a constantly moving target.
So how can marketers rise above the noise? How can we craft
messaging and stories that will resonate with our audience’s
changing interests?
The answer is to embrace a framework that adapts to your
audience’s tastes and priorities as quickly as they change. It’s
innovate or sink.
Agile marketing does not disregard careful planning. Instead, it is a
powerful and necessary evolution that empowers you to reach your
audience in ways that are faster, leaner, and more creative — to
help you become more competitive.
Take Coca-Cola, for example. In 2011 they announced that they
would shift their marketing from “creative excellence” to “content
excellence” as part of a new Liquid and Linked strategy. At the
center of this was a 70/20/10 content framework to encourage
innovation:
• 70% low-risk, established “now” content
• 20% innovative “new” content based ton what works
• 10% untested content, the “next” ideas that will become
tomorrow's 70% or 20%
Why is Coca-Cola applying 30% of their budget to innovation and
experimentation? Because when juxtaposed with the real-time
internet, those rigid and heavily-planned executions from the past
are risky, costly and potentially irrelevant.
Coca-Cola is not alone. As evidenced by Gatorade’s new Mission
Control Center, Forbes’ real-time newsroom, and Procter &
Gamble’s daily review meetings—the list goes on—companies big
and small are flocking to agile marketing.
“Start small and scale fast.”
Wendy Clark

SVP, Integrated Marketing Communications & Capabilities
The Coca-Cola Company
BENEFITS OF AGILE MARKETING
Here are five reasons that businesses are adopting agile marketing
practices in display advertising.
Mitigated Risk
By making small bets on many creative initiatives, measuring them
carefully, and betting big on what’s working, marketers can
significantly reduce risk compared to large-scale campaign
executions planned in one sitting.
Improved ROI
An agile approach can improve ROI by reducing the likelihood of
spending in areas that are unfruitful. When an initiative is working
well, budget can be ramped up accordingly.
Validated Learning
Validated learning refers to lessons learned by gathering data, i.e. a
numbers-driven, analytical method, instead of one driven by
intuition. By tracking marketing efforts with meaningful metrics,
the agile marketer can make decisions based on evidence instead of
gut feeling.
Inquisitive marketers can learn as much through experimentation
as they might through a focus group or social media — maybe
more. The insights you gain from your digital campaigns can then
inform the rest of your marketing strategy.
Quicker Adaptability
Responding to current events and adopting new technologies
becomes much easier with an agile approach. Whether change is
prompted by external events (e.g. the stock market drops or a new
competitor emerges) or internal ones (e.g. changes in product or
positioning) the agile marketer is ready to adapt.

Rich Customer Insight
Successful agile marketing requires careful observation of
customer behavior. By analyzing how a customer interacts with
messaging and creative, the agile marketer gains a deeper
understanding of the customer than they would from a traditional
waterfall marketing. This allows marketers to deliver the type of
ads that delight customers more quickly and effectively.
CHAPTER 2: WHAT ARE THE KEY CONCEPTS IN
AGILE MARKETING?
Agile marketing, while flexible, does rely on a core set of values.
Below are important concepts as described by the industry’s
leading agile experts. Since every organization is different, don’t
be afraid to adjust your working methods, too.
PREPARE TO ACT QUICKLY
Jonathon Colman, Principal Experience Architect at REI,
encourages adopting a bias toward action. Don’t get bogged down
by “analysis paralysis” where overthinking and overplanning
impede progress. By developing a sense of urgency, you can seize
unexpected marketing opportunities when they arise.
Example: Gatorade Mission Control Center
Read Article ⊲
Gatorade keeps a pulse on its consumer base with an impressive
data-monitoring room dubbed the Mission Control Center. With an
eye on social media channels, blogs, and relevant topics, Gatorade
is prepared to refine their marketing when an opportunity strikes.
For example, when Mission Control noticed the viral popularity of
a rap song featured in one of their commercials, they quickly
worked with the recording artist to release a full version of the
track to Gatorade fans on Twitter and Facebook. Despite the
complexity of the task, Gatorade spotted an opportunity to connect

with their customer and took action accordingly.
KEEP A PULSE ON TRENDS
The best marketing teams have a constant pulse on customer
sentiment, internal business performance, and industry trends.
There are numerous technologies available now that provide
insight into consumer behavior. Keeping track of what people are
engaging with on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and
LinkedIn are all ways to use both qualitative and quantitative
means to understand customer sentiment and to make sure that
your marketing is relevant.
Example: Procter and Gamble Daily Meetings
Read Article ⊲
P&G is one example of a global company that uses robust
analytics to ensure that they are aware of what the customer wants.
Example: Hubspot
View Slides ⊲
Kirsten Knipp’s presentation on how agile marketing has improved
prioritization, predictability, and transparency in marketing at
Hubspot dives deeper into how agile marketing is implemented on
the ground.
BUILD NIMBLE TEAMS
Agile teams are small, which enables efficient communication and
decision making. They are also cross-functional, which means that
they can develop and deploy test campaigns rapidly.
Teams should be small enough to ensure collaboration and
empowered to make decisions efficiently. Having members of
product, sales, engineering, and customer service working
together, even peripherally, helps to ensure that various
stakeholder interests are represented. This maintains alignment
within the company and strengthens the backbone of marketing

efforts.
Example: The New Forbes Newsroom
Read Article ⊲
Forbes has transformed their newsroom, upending the morning
meeting and redefining roles. The result is a structure more
focused on content success in real-time. Using real-time data, the
team tracks site activity and article performance.
Old hierarchies are dissolved through social software that
encourages an ongoing discussion. Virtually anyone can chime in
with ideas, enabling the publisher to conduct the flow of content in
an agile and effective way.
“It’s now a far more inclusive, continuous and real-time idea-
generating process - a “group think” that reflects the era of
social media and strategy of Forbes.com itself.”
Lewis DVorkin
Chief Product Officer at Forbes Media
MAKE UPDATES IN REAL-TIME
Agile marketing requires a much faster cadence than traditional
marketing. Instead of lengthy planning and execution over the
course of several months, being agile means breaking things down
into a matter of steps that can be accomplished in weeks or even
days.
Marketing efforts fluctuate between planning, execution, review,
and optimization. This doesn’t mean there can’t be big campaigns
or long-term strategies; it means that major initiatives are built up
through multiple refinements and released in full when the data
shows they can reliably succeed. It also means that marketers are
monitoring the performance of ad campaigns to figure out what’s
working and what’s not, and making updates in real time to capture
insights from current trends.

Case Study: Wikia’s NCAA basketball ad campaign
Wikia.com took an agile, responsive approach with a banner
campaign during the NCAA basketball tournament. The ad
allowed users to skin the Wikia basketball site with images of their
favorite of the final four teams during March Madness by clicking
on the ad. But when Wikia first launched the ad, interactions were
far below expectations.
Wikia quickly realized that the ad creative didn’t clearly indicate
that the skin of the site would only change if the user clicked one
of the buttons. Visitors didn’t want to interrupt their browsing
experience by clicking on a URL that would lead them to a new
page, so they avoided interacting with the ad altogether.
So Wikia started iterating. They changed the click behavior to
mouse-over, and updated the language in the ad from “Choose
your favorite team” to “Hover on your favorite team.”
Wikia’s iterations paid off big time, boosting the interaction rate 9-
fold and more than doubling the click-through rate, transforming
the ad into a smashing success.
Read the full case study and experience the ad here.
Wikia.com is a Flite customer, making it easy for the company to
create interactive display ads that can be optimized in real-time all
in one platform.
See more information about Flite’s SaaS platform here.
ITERATE IN SHORT CYCLES
The agile feedback loop offers a model for iterating on work in
short cycles. Progress is measured by the rate of learning, where
fast learning is rewarded with rapid optimization and successful
campaigns. While some marketers have slightly different ways of
explaining this cycle, the core process is to Listen, Program,
Update, and Measure.

1. Listen
Understand which trends matter to your customers. Determine if
and how these changes should be addressed in your marketing
efforts.
2. Program
Develop and curate content to reflect daily trends.
3. Update
Make your marketing relevant with real-time updates to messaging
and creative.
4. Measure
Monitor results using accurate metrics that reflect your marketing
goals. Apply what you learn to future updates and campaigns.
CHAPTER 3: HOW AGILE IS TOO AGILE?
Being agile isn’t an excuse to fumble along forwards, backwards,
or sideways until you get your act together. On the contrary, agile
marketing requires you to have a strong vision of what you want to
accomplish, what problem you are solving, and for whom.
There are plenty of ways to be led astray in the rapid pace of agile
marketing, but with awareness and solid decision-making, these
pitfalls are easily navigable.
Here are a few items to be aware of:
Pressure to Cut Corners
With a faster cadence and bias toward action come the pressure to
cut corners. Yes, you should act and iterate, but make sure to keep
standards high with the quality of your marketing; otherwise, you
risk damaging your brand.
Insufficient Exploration Time
Sometimes it makes sense to delay acting until you have explored
a variety of potential options. Especially at the onset of new
initiatives, it’s okay to resist the fail-fast mentality in order to

encourage creativity. Execution should wait until the optimal
strategy becomes apparent, but that won’t happen until your team
has leeway to think freely and creatively. When brainstorming,
there are no bad ideas. But when acting, there certainly are.
Refining, Not Defining
Agile’s iterative approach is great for refining a concept, but it
isn’t an excuse to fumble along without a plan. Agile marketing
requires that you have a strong vision of what you want to
accomplish, what problem you are solving, and for whom. This
vision can change once you get started, but by thinking critically
up front, you create guardrails about how to prioritize. Striving to
balance of flexibility and steadfastness will allow you to fully reap
the benefits of agile marketing.
“The point of Agile Marketing isn’t just to get more done, it’s to
get the right things done so that we can hit our goals and
ultimately generate more business.”
Jim Ewel
agilemarketing.net
CHAPTER 4: HOW DO YOU OVERCOME “BANNER
BLINDNESS” WITH AGILE MARKETING?
Agile marketing gives marketers the flexibility to take advantage
of new techniques and tools as they emerge. Analyzing social
media, search, and display campaigns is becoming an increasingly
real-time process, which presents opportunities to optimize
marketing efforts under very short turnaround times.
Agile marketing technologies:
• In-depth analytics available in real-time for digital media
• Automated, real-time ad exchanges
• Audience targeting and retargeting with specificity
• Ad automation capable of changing ads based on geolocation,

demographics, date, weather, behavior, etc.
• Application-like functionality in display ads that can deliver
highly interactive experiences
CAUSES OF BANNER BLINDNESS
Skeptics keep insisting that display is dead, but the numbers
suggest quite the opposite. Display is engaged in a period of
serious growth. Forrester Research predicts that display advertising
revenue will more than double by 2016, with search revenue only
doubling in that time.
Consider how display marketers who use the web’s best
technologies and agile mindsets can overcome these common
complaints:
CUSTOMERS SAY:
• Cause of Banner Blindness
• Agile Marketing Solution
• These ads don’t appeal to me. They’re not fresh and interesting
like the content on the website they run on.
• Cloud-based ad services allow ads to easily be updated with
emerging content, new themes and stories relevant to the news and
memes of the day.
• I look right past ads. I’ve been ignoring them for years, and I’m
good at not looking at ads.
• News ads are more interactive and functional, and can offer the
types of useful and engaging content found on a website - not just
images and text enticing visitors to click through.
• I don’t want to interrupt what I intended to do when I came to
this site. I’m not going to click on an ad and leave this page.
• Paid media publishing replaces promotional language enticing
readers to click off the page with engaging content and
functionality that visitors can enjoy on the page itself.

MARKETERS SAY:
• Cause of Ineffective Ads
• Agile Marketing Solution
• I love my ad creative, but I’m not sure if my audience will.
• Continually optimizing campaigns generates a vast knowledge
base around what works. Home in with little bets and bet big once
you hit on success.
• My budget doesn’t allow me to get the results I need to justify the
expense.
• Through experimentation and validated learning, ads can be
optimized for a fraction of the cost of coming up with one big idea.
Plus new ads can be so interactive and packed with content, they
may eliminate the need for custom landing pages.
• I can’t tell if my display campaigns are successful.
• Engaging display ads can track more metrics than just clicks,
allowing advertisers to see if messaging resonates based on other
criteria, like video play time and time-on-unit.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD DISPLAY AD?
Ads with little more than promotional copy and graphics have
waning appeal for web users. What kind of ads aren’t being
ignored? Ones that are relevant, content-rich, and reflect the
memes and news of the day.
Here are four critical aspects of successful display ads that can be
maximized using an agile marketing approach.
Relevance
Audiences are more likely to enjoy getting ads that feel relevant to
them. In the agile marketing framework display ads can be quickly
updated with content and messaging that are meaningful to your
audience. For an uplift in performance, use personalized creative
based on audience targeting. But be careful not to invade user

privacy; there’s a fine line between being surprisingly relevant and
creepy.
Interactivity
Good ads are as interactive as the web itself, allowing the user to
explore the creative and learn about the product. Use smartly-
planned navigation to showcase the kinds of content you might
have otherwise put on a landing page or other larger ad format,
then optimize that content based on performance. Look to mobile
sites for inspiration for how content can be packed into a small
space.
Clearly Safe Interaction
Interactive ads should always behave as expected. Build in visual
cues, like tabs and scroll bars, to show that the ad is safe to
explore. Click-throughs should require a user’s obvious intent.
Time-on-unit will improve, and the click-throughs you get will be
far more likely to result in conversion.
Context
In many cases, partnering with publishers to create a more
integrated or contextual ad experience can significantly bolster
results. Native display ads that blend into the page and aren’t
distracting will circumvent banner blindness.
CHAPTER 5: WHAT ARE EXAMPLES OF AGILE
MARKETING IN ACTION?
Even static units and basic rich media ads can benefit from
periodic iterations. If interactivity isn’t in your game plan, agile
testing and experimentation still have plenty to offer.
WHEN PREPARATION MEETS OPPORTUNITY: HOW TO STAY
AGILE DURING UNEXPECTED NEWS
Agile goldmines are opportunities to elevate your marketing based
on events and situations that occur in real-time. Sometimes the

goldmine is an event with viral appeal, and sometimes it involves
dodging a bullet. When running agile display campaigns, keep an
eye out for opportunities like these:
• P&G: In the final laps of a Daytona 500 race in spring 2012, an
accident caused 200 gallons of jet fuel to spill onto the raceway.
When truckloads of Tide detergent were used to clean up the mess,
P&G spotted an opportunity, and launched ads featuring the
popular story.
Read Article ⊲
• Charles Schwab: When the investment market was shaken up
after the US credit rating was downgraded in 2011, Charles
Schwab changed their existing banner campaign to address the
social climate. Switching content from news about their new
mobile app to timely commentary about the event, Chuck
transformed a difficult moment into an opportunity to show
leadership in the industry.
Read Article ⊲
• NBC: When Saturday Night Live spoofed frozen pizza products
in its viral mock commercial for “Almost Pizza”, companies like
DiGiorno could have capitalized on the PR of the viral video. By
demonstrating a sense of humor, brands can leverage current viral
memes to connect with customers and start a conversation.
View Video ⊲
HOW TO TEST IDEAS TO OPTIMIZE DISPLAY ADS
Often ads become outdated before they even hit the market.
Months before a campaign goes live, the advertiser is forced to
guess the trends and memes that will be relevant at the time of
launch. When you have the ability to iterate, you should
experiment, not guess.
Successful application of an agile marketing process requires being

strategic and conscientious. Construct a framework for
experimentation, keeping brand guidelines, company values, and
your audience in mind. Then, come up with some hypotheses to
validate through low-risk trial runs that can be scaled up based on
their success.
Experimentation Strategy
To many marketers, experimentation is already part of your
process. You already A/B test landing pages, or keep watch on
your social channels to see what content gets the most shares and
likes. Congratulations! You’re an agile marketer and you didn’t
even know it.
Applying this agile approach to display advertising opens up a
tremendous amount of possibility for what can be changed and
how. Always remember the scientific method, that the goal is to
empirically prove a hypothesis with data.
Run small tests to learn without much risk, then once you come
upon ideas that work, bet big.
Some Experiments for Optimizing Display Ads
• Experiment with functionality
Video vs SWF animation overlay
Live Twitter feed vs. Facebook feed vs. static messaging
In-ad videos versus clicking through to reach content
• Experiment with creative
Content
Layout
Navigation
• Experiment with context/media buy
Ad Networks
Targeting
Frequency

CONCLUSION
Today’s digital landscape requires marketers to keep up with
quickly changing trends and memes. To engage audiences,
marketers must learn to experiment and evolve, or risk being left
behind.
Agile marketing provides the opportunity to take small steps that
minimize the risk of innovation. In this guide, we examined the
who, how and why of agile marketing, and demonstrated its
enormous potential with display ads. With a bias towards action,
smart meetings, and nimble teams, agile marketing can transform
your display advertising approach and the way you connect with
customers.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s take the first step!
START CREATING AGILE DISPLAY ADS
Flite enables publishers and marketers to builds ads that pull in
real-time content from all over the web. Start creating, measuring,
and optimizing your desktop and mobile display ads to drive
engagement.
Request a demo today.
Sources:
Little Bets, by Peter Sims
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