Flite Launches A Free Online ‘Design Studio’ For Building HTML5 Ads

Hey, remember when people were still arguing about HTML5 versus Flash?

The battle seems long over at this point, with the rise of the iPhone essentially killing Adobe’s Flash platform, but Will Price, CEO of ad tech company Flite, said the transition has taken longer than you might think – it won’t be until 2014, he said, that advertisers and publishers “get off Flash completely.” (As one indicator of how mobile and tablet have exploded this year, Price said Flite has saw 80 percent growth in mobile traffic in October compared to the same period last year.)

So Flite this week launched a new version of its design studio that’s built for HTML5, rather than Flash. The goal, Price said, is to “put a shot across the bow to Google and Adobe as major brands and publishers move to HTML5 and to multiscreen advertising.”

He suggested that the most comparable product is probably Google’s recently released Web Designer, but he noted that Google’s product requires users to download software to build their HTML5 websites and ads, while Flite’s Design Studio is completely based in the web browser. That means Flite has “all the web-based collaboration of a Google Doc versus a Microsoft Word doc.”

Other differentiators, Price said, include the Design Studio’s user interface, which doesn’t require any coding. It also doesn’t require designers to switch from the tools that they already us, since they can import files from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. It’s also easy to preview exactly how an ad will look on smartphones and tablets. Plus the content of an ad can be updated in love without requiring users to continually export new files.

And like Google’s Web Designer, the Flite Design Studio is free. Users can build the ads for free with Flite, then the company hopes to make money by serving those ads. You can read more about the product here.