Looking Forward to a Day When All Ads Are Created Equal

‘Tis the season to prognosticate!

I know you may be tapped out on “Top 2013 prediction” lists, but here’s one worth your time.

Digitas, the digital brand agency, is going in whole hog, providing a full 5 days of predictions for 2013 on their blog, Digitas Distillery.

Covering off on everything from “consumer context” to “blended” CPMs, their mobile post has a lot going on. I agree with almost everything it says, with the sole exception of the “Mobile Thursday” idea, which envisions Cyber Monday shopping migrating to a Thanksgiving ritual for passing the time while the bird cooks (that sounds a lot like “Freedom Fries” to me, so don’t expect that to stick anytime soon).

One item in particular stood out, “the end of the ‘mobile web.’” This explains that the idea of a mobile-optimized web site will die off, in favor of a responsive design that works no matter which screen you look at it on. This ideal is of great interest to me, and by extension to Centro as a whole, and it’s something I talk about extensively whenever I get the chance.

If you think about the logical conclusion of that line of thinking, it will have great impact on our industry as a whole: Today, we build multiple versions of ads – some for desktop, some for mobile – and they use different technologies (Flash, GIF, JPG, HTML5).

If content owners will start responding to users – who, as Chia Chen, SVP, Mobile Lead of Digitas North America notes “want to access all of the brand’s content and functionality from any device” – and start creating sole versions of their sites that look the same on every device, we can (and will) then create single types of ads that do the very same thing.

We’ll still create ads in different dimensions, but I’m betting the ads we build that are today for the ‘mobile web’ will tomorrow be the only types of ads, and they will run on all the different devices equally.

Now, if I could only get iTunes Genius to actually build me a decent playlist…

Read all of Digitas’ 2013 predictions here.