• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, May 15, 2013

The question facing most marketers is one of scale, and probably the single most overlooked challenge comes from how to design experiences for dozens of different platforms in an efficient manner.

In 1995 you only had to design for the desktop web browser. By 2000 you had to design an experience for a desktop browser plus WAP for early mobile access. In 2005 things got more challenging as you were forced to design for the desktop browser, WAP, and iPhone as well as Android phones. In 2013 you have to design for the desktop, iPhone, multiple Android phones with different screen sizes, a number of tablets from Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Samsung and Microsoft. You have to design experiences for the browser as well as for your app environments, and all of these need to be customizable to some extent so the interactions can be optimized based on the users when you are leveraging 1st or 3^rd party data for those purposes. Most marketers have come to recognize these issues and are focused on Responsive Design as the solution.

Responsive design is a huge consideration and surprisingly not everyone is up to speed on it. Regardless of what you may think you know, not every platform is designed to be responsive to the platform it is delivered on. Some platforms are unable to be rendered properly on all devices, and as more and more devices are being launched every month, the need for responsive design is increasing quickly. Responsive design also applies to advertising units because they need to be able to be inserted into the design specs for all these channels and devices.

When you tie responsive design into data-driven targeting, you enter into a world that is interesting and scalable. Responsive, optimized solutions are the future of the web-marketing world as more systems shift to automation and optimization. More marketers are implementing dynamic creative based on data, and once these are dropped into a responsive design platform, it’s feasible that you can have a single point solution for all your digital advertising creative. Take it one step further and have that system feed into the content management system for your core site or apps and you can truly have a scalable, native advertising solution that functions across multiple platforms to deliver high performance experiences to your prospects and customers. That’s the goal, after all!

Knowing who your customers are, where they’re accessing your information from, and what they are looking for is the objective of every marketer in 2013. Thankfully the solutions you need to realize these dreams are literally only a few clicks away as most of these solutions are layering into the “marketing stack” that most companies are evaluating right now. The marketing stack can be broken down into 3 areas; the data layer, the execution layer and the reporting/optimization layer. These kinds of creative solutions fit squarely in the execution layer, with capabilities for reporting and optimization either being integrated or outsourced to a partner in the tech stack. Have you started to examine these solutions and see how they plug into one another? If not, you should probably start looking into it because I am pretty sure your competitors have already begun!