Shift to responsive design creates ad challenges
For publishers transitioning to HTML5 as their next-generation web environment, implementing the concepts of responsive design offers its fair share of technical issues. A more pressing challenge, however, may be cultural: Convincing marketers to develop responsive advertising.
Executives at two media companies that are rebuilding their publishing platforms around HTML5 and responsive design – New York Media and IDG’s Consumer & SMB group – last week lamented the ad market’s lukewarm support for responsive ads as they ramp up their own responsive design deployments.
“You can scale the ad sizes but you can’t scale the creative,” Aaron Jones, chief technology officer and vice president of product development for IDG’s Consumer & SMB group, said during a keynote presentation at the MPA Digital: Technology conference in New York.
“There’s a great rush to responsive UI, but the ad solutions have been left behind,” Larry Chevres, chief technology officer of New York Media, said during a panel discussion at the MPA event.
As New York Media transitions its web properties, which include NYmag.com and Vulture.com, to responsive design, “we realized we have an opportunity to also improve the ad experience, but we’re not seeing solutions from current providers,” Chevres said. “Clients are still not sure what responsive UI means and how they can deliver better results with responsive ads.”
New York Media and IDG have each had to implement workarounds for display units as they roll out HTML5 across their websites. At New York Media, developers are using the media queries feature in CSS3 to automatically re-size ads for specific devices. IDG developers are using “lazy loading” techniques to identify the device type for each page request and then call the properly sized ads for that device.
Both approaches are a stopgap until advertisers adopt a standard solution for HTML5 ads. Chevres said HTML5 offers an opportunity for the ad market to greatly simplify the current collection of display unit standards – more than a dozen in all – around three basic unit types: horizontal, vertical and square.
“Each ad type could respond and fill appropriately into their space,” he said. “That would make ad operations much easier, decrease development costs, and create a better user experience.”
Jones, in an interview following his keynote, said that as more publishers adopt responsive design – and showcase its benefits – advertisers will follow.
“By creating a better experience for the user, we’re creating a richer opportunity for the advertisers to present themselves,” he said. “When the market does move, they’ll start creating some really interesting ad experiences.”
Additional reading
- Responsive Ads in the Real World: Ad Server Implementation, Rob Flaherty
- Adaptive Web-Design & Advertising, Jon Phillips
- The state of responsive advertising: the publishers' perspective, .net magazine
Join the discussion
“There’s a great rush to responsive UI, but the ad solutions have been left behind,” Larry Chevres, chief technology officer of New York Media, said during a panel discussion at the MPA event.
No Larry, we - the readers never wanted ads in the first place. You didn't get left behind, you were just not watching.
It's like these huge advertising companies think that the evolution of web design is like the brown paper bag around their bottle of broken promises.
@theavangelist
I think that Ad agencies will just have to evolve like publishers have to do. The reason that responsive development in publishing is growing so rapidly is because of the success of the early adapters such as FlipBoard. We have been developing digital magazine software and released a responsive magazine solution last year (www.3dissue.com). The big issue that we hear from our clients is how can they work in advertising.
I think that it will be the likes of Google or Admob that provide the solutions. also Adobes new CS6 has tools that will allow the creative agencies to create ads that are responsive.
Is there any news on how Google will support RWD in their ad servers? If core products like DART don't deal with this soon it will be a real mess.
Rob,
Timely topic, but there are some fantastic solutions coming down the pipe in the very near future. Including some responsive solutions from large newsstand publishers. We are working on some RWD solutions with interesting ad elements for our own B2B titles as well. Later this year I think you'll start to see this really isn't a challenge at all. A lot of great mobile minds have been working diligently on it for quite some time.
Jeff @ThreeLakesWI