Cross-device Portability Demands, Part IV
Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 12:49 PM
Want to sell cross-device ads? There are big problems to overcome.
By
William Dunkerley
Pew Research has reported that by 2015, 66
percent of Americans already owned at least two digital devices
(smartphone, desktop or laptop, tablet) -- and that 36 percent owned all
three. The company also claims about 7 in 10 American adults currently
own smartphones. What's more, there is growing evidence that users of
small-screen devices are willing to use them to read magazine-length
articles.
By this time there should be no illusions about the
need for publishers to adopt the kind of cross-device portability that
"responsive Web design" (RWD) provides. We've covered the basics of this
concept in earlier parts in this series.
While it is perfectly
feasible to create editorial designs for RWD, advertising is a different
story. That's because in current practice, many ads have a dimensionally
fixed format. Look here
to see an illustration of a leaderboard ad on a desktop, and here
to see how it gets butchered by RWD.
The editorial content
successfully flows into the new screen size, but the ad does not. That
does not happen in all publications. Some will allow the RWD to scale
down the size, much as you would reduce the size of a photo. One problem
in doing that to an ad is that all but headline type might become
unreadable.
Here are illustrations:
Full-screen
view.
Mobile
view.
What makes this problem more intractable is that many such
ads are not hosted on the publication's server. The page has code
embedded that reaches out and grabs the ad from a third party. So the
ads don't conform to the responsive design.
One workaround many
publishers use is to sell ad sizes that will fill the width of a small
screen. But when the ad is viewed on a PC, it becomes just a tiny
fractional. The accumulated knowledge about ad effectiveness tells us
that this is not a good idea. Small ads are less effective than large
ads.
If an advertiser wants to pay for a big splash, that means
filling the screen horizontally (and perhaps vertically too) no matter
what the screen size is.
But there does not seem to be a
technical remedy for this problem at present. The trick would be to
embed a specially prepared ad into the publication's RWD format. I
discussed this need with M.J. Johnson and Rob Morton at Akamai
Technologies. They readily saw the utility of the approach. They
suggested there would be still another benefit: it would help
advertisers avoid the increasing use of pop-up blockers.
There's
another workaround that we'll present in a future part of this series.
William
Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.
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