Among the gripes I have about responsive web design is the issue of display ads. The most popular ad units today are a product of the desktop web experience. These are fixed sizes and entirely unfit for the mobile form factor.
In keeping with most mobile metrics, mobile display advertising in the U.S. has over doubled in the last 24 months. Again, these are ads at fixed sizes, and there are many of them to suit various mobile screen dimensions and densities.
These can be nightmarish conditions for responsive design.
So here’s a thought: Why not experiment with ads that are themselves responsive? They could be packaged up with their own media queries and progressively dependent assets and served to a wide range of devices.
Someone out there should try it. Just sayin.
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7 insightful responses to Responsive ads
How would it best work though?
Would the leaderboard on a typical desktop be resized to the leading space for the mobile?
For mobile we look to make the content the most visible item, so that would mean moving the heading banner and work it into the content, but that then might become less contextual advertising.
I like the idea, perhaps we’ll see google releasing a new ad type.
I’m not sure, really. It’s more of a brain burp than anything.
But it could be worth exploring to a new class of ad units from a mobile first perspective. What’s ultimately needed I think is an intelligent way to move markup around dynamically. In the responsive sites I’ve built, I struggled with order of content — and ads would be subjected to the same type of challenge.
Given that many ad-supported apps use a sticky footer banner for ad space, perhaps a responsive ad could mimic this behavior. You’d likely need to create several versions of the ad, and serve up the right one on the right device. Maybe a timed carousel that rotates your ads through the banner space if you’ve got multiple ads. Could be a bit murky, but i don’t see a reason it couldn’t be done.
I’ve got this issue to contend with on a client site @offroadcode and I think the only reasonable (and client maintainable) option is multiple versions of an ad creative being rendered out depending on the screen.
I don’t see it being that big an issue specifying common breakpoint ads which could also be more specific to the device.
Not sure there’s a silver bullet to this part of responsive design right now.
J.
Aaron, Mark Boulton stirred up a lot of discussion about this topic this week. The Google+ discussion thread on his blog post led me to yours.
Anyway, I built a few responsive ad demos that I thought you be interested in seeing. They’re fairly simple — they don’t solve all the problems — but it’s a start.
http://www.ravelrumba.com/blog/responsive-ad-demos/
Hello to all, how is all, I think every one is getting more from this web site, and your views are pleasant in favor of new users.
I’ve been interested in the ‘responsive banner ad’ problem for a while now. I finally created my first set of responsive ads with HTML5, you can check them out here: http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/responsive-banner-ads