MediaBrix’s responsive design ensures in-game ads will always look right (exclusive)

Advertising is a delicate business. It doesn’t take much to put off a potential customer, which is why it’s so important that everything is just right. But that’s getting more difficult to do in the mobile space.

MediaBrix, an advertising company for Fortune 500 brands, has a solution that promises in-game ads will look correct no matter which device they are displaying on. The company is using responsive design, which adapts new web technology to rebuild the content on the fly for any device.

It’s all that fragmentation

“Every other week, there’s some new device that uses some new screen format that deepens this need to make sure ads look and act correct across all these different devices,” MediaBrix chief product officer Jay Drago told GamesBeat. “The industry as a whole has a significant problem with this fragmentation.”

The problem has several different facets. Publishers are already deciding whether to build a game on iOS or Android. Then they have to support the different screen sizes and resolutions within those platforms. The latest iPad has a different aspect ratio than the latest iPhone. On top of that, some games are playable while held either vertically or horizontally.

All of these factors combine to create a very confusing canvas for advertisers to work with.

“The way [advertisers] have been addressing this problem is to make custom ads just for iPhone and different ads just for iPad,” said Drago. “The biggest problem with that is demand is going up every day.”

It’s an expensive problem for everyone involved, and it’s one of those monetization issues that the creatives within a developer don’t really want to think about.

“The industry can’t be put in a position where the publishers are forced to come up with a solution,” said Drago. “They’re just trying to get their game developed and out the door. When an advertiser comes along and says, ‘I’d like to put ads inside the game,’ there needs to be a solution that will accommodate all of this device diversity that’s out there.”

Responsive design that works even with interactive elements

MediaBrix is offering publishers and brand marketers the first solution that works across platform with interactive ad units. Responsive design has popped up in a few other advertising companies, but MediaBrix’s technology works with ads that have interactive items.

So while other companies can only guarantee that advertising images will appear correctly, MediaBrix is promising that even complex elements like a dealer locator in a car advertisement will display properly no matter what the context.

And it’s a fire-and-forget solution for developers. The way the industry was doing it before was to make sure that each device had its own custom version of the ad, and that is time-consuming and expensive. Even more frustrating for developers, when a new device format comes out, they have to go back into their old games to make sure everything works with not just their game but with the advertising as well.

MediaBrix’s responsive design allows developers to ignore that advertising because the content will simply rebuild itself for any screen. It saves them time, which saves everybody money. That’s probably one of the reasons this company attracted its big-name clientele like Coca-cola and Lexus.

In a business as difficult as advertising, any money saved is money earned.