Billionaire former Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg says one of the best pieces of advice in business is this: “when the customer says yes, stop talking.” 

Well, it makes sense. If the deal is done, why complicate things? But that’s exactly what publishers have been doing in a big way since the explosion in mobile traffic over the last ten years.

Big brands want to advertise with big publishers

The fact is that big brands want to advertise with big publishers. It’s one of the only places they can reach the right people in the right environment. Yes, social media is wonderful for scale and targeting, but nothing quite beats being surrounded by high quality editorial. And yes, the brands as publishers phenomenon is real, but it’s mighty hard to attract a large audience to brand properties.

So it should be a done deal, except for one thing. Many publishers are now seeing 50% or more of their traffic coming from mobile devices. And standard ad formats designed for desktop computers do not work well on mobile, so publishers have to ask their advertisers if they would like to advertise on mobile too, which means different artwork requirements and creative assets, and may mean dealing with a different agency and buying team too. 

Asking this one question risks losing 50% of the potential audience for a campaign - and associated revenue - in one stroke.

But it’s worse than that. I recently met a publisher that intended to offer their advertisers a three screen solution - that’s separate creative assets for desktop, tablet and mobile. This gives interested advertisers three new opportunities to say no. 

This is madness. Especially when you consider that there aren’t actually three screen sizes, but a huge number of variants, from the iPhone to the iPad Mini to the iPad to the MacBook. And that's before you tilt the mobiles and tablets on their side. And that's just Apple devices! A friend of mine has a Samsung Galaxy you could land a helicopter on. Where does that fit in the media kit?

Native ad formats that work across all devices

Over in Silicon Valley things are very different. The giant media companies based there, who let’s not forget are in exactly the same business of selling advertising as newspapers and magazines, do not ask this question.

Instead, they use native ad formats that work across all devices. They don’t, by default, give advertisers an opportunity to segment their audience by device. 

But it’s more than that. One of the reasons publishers are in such a tight spot is because mobile banners are just not very good. Advertisers have never been excited by them, they don’t work very well across the different screen sizes available, and can’t cope when a device is tilted on its side. The result is that even when an advertiser does want to target 100% of a publisher’s traffic they usually don’t have to pay very much for the mobile component.

In fact, I recently met someone at a very large publisher that confided that while almost 50% of their traffic is now mobile only 1% of their digital ad revenue comes from this source.

Wow. That’s a disaster in the making. Something desperately needs to be done. And that something is to follow the tech giants of San Francisco and adopt ad placements that are native, that belong to the publisher, that work seamlessly on every device, and that perform brilliantly for advertisers. 

If it works for Twitter, Google, Linkedin, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, it can work for the Guardian, Telegraph, New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde and the Sydney Morning Herald too.

 Guy Cookson is CMO and co-founder at Respond