Cross-Screen Advertising Offers More Value for Publishers

By Elisa Rivero

With the growth in tablets and smartphones, Miller says responsive-designed sites are now table stakes for publishers.

ResponsiveAd’s insight:
Nieman Journalism Lab recently published a Q&A with Andrew Miller, CEO of The Guardian, on a variety of subjects, including responsive design. In the piece by Justin Ellis, Miller said, “To me, HTML5 or responsive-based is just actually being in the game now. If you’re not, you’ll have real issues serving content across all the tablet formats that are coming through so quickly.” The Guardian, which launched its responsively designed site in November, was only one of several major publishers to implement responsive design in 2012 – from Time to Mashable to The BBC, and more.Although this may not be specifically related to the examples cited above, we always ask publishers, “what strategies are you using to not only monetize your responsively designed sites, but offer more value?”

We believe that by providing readers with an optimal experience across screens by using responsive design — and advertising — publishers can build content-marketing strategies that link mobile, tablet and desktop.

Going responsive can create a synergistic bundle of a campaign that allows publishers to offer cross-screen advertising. Even though there is a value for each channel independently (mobile, tablet or desktop), the sum of the whole can be treated as a boost in publishers’ overall campaigns. In addition, how the ad content best interacts in the overall editorial content will lead to different types of ad footprints and solutions, such that “native ads” can be considered responsive ads.

Responsive design also offers publishers a better way to integrate the end-user experience around ads, and not just cookie-cutter sizes that are delivered through mediation or plugged-in networks. Publishers can create inherent experiences or conversational opportunities with their content from screen to screen, as users “screen-shift.”

Thirdly, in this era of online social conversation, inbound links from Twitter, Facebook, and even search, provide new ways of gaining users like never before. Advertisers and brands that live within the editorial of a publisher that sells advertising can be treated with further insights on the overall multi-screen experience, not only within that publication, but in a greater way with usage of advanced “data analysis” tools that are coming into the market.

See on www.niemanlab.org