• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 3, 2025

Creative agencies and brands are frustrated with the amount of assets they need to develop for campaigns. It has become costly, complicated and expensive.

These challenges pushed the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to resurface a move toward responsive advertising in programmatic and away from outdated fixed-size ad formats, a strategy from 2017 that for some reason never really caught on, according to Angelina Eng, vice president of measurement, attribution and data center at the IAB.

The responsive ads were developed to adjust to screens and devices, and ratio based rather than fixed ad sizes.

“Over the years there has been very little adoption,” Eng said. “Publishers have been developing custom ad sizes that don’t fall into those ratios, and we think it would be great if new platforms would create responsive ads.”

Eng believes this approach could help solve major challenges across the industry. The issue points to specific coding that is required so the ad responds to several different sizes, but Eng said advertisers and publishers do not pay close enough attention to the sizes that already exist.

The goal is to ensure seamless delivery across mobile, desktop, connected television (CTV), and emerging platforms like augmented reality and virtual reality. The change will have broad implications for advertisers, agencies, publishers, and tech platforms, especially as retail media networks, CTV, and in-game advertising introduce increasingly fragmented ad formats.

“I don’t think creative agencies want to spend the clients’ money to resize and create 50 different ad sizes, but they would love to create five different ad sizes for 20 different versions that can be personalized to different audience segments,” Eng said. “This gives them the flexibility to ideate more concepts within the same budget.”

Eng, which created a spec template for campaigns, said the media agencies look at this change as foreign and just use whatever is passed to them by the creative agencies, which might now be paying attention to this opportunity with responsive ads. They create responsive assets for websites, but it’s important to know they can use the same type of technology for advertising.

Google and Microsoft have offered responsive ads for years. The ads adjust their format and content to match user queries and ad spaces to ensure the message reaches potential customers. 

Responsive search ads debuted on Google in 2018 and became the default ad type in Google Ads in February 2021. The ads automatically adjust size, appearance, and format to fit available ad spaces. One responsive ad may appear as a small text ad in one place and a large image ad in another. The ads, per Google, fit just about any ad space across the Display Network, and can take on native formatting to match the tone and feel of the websites they show on.

Microsoft introduced responsive ad formats in Bing, including Multimedia Ads and Responsive Search Ads, in 2019 and 2021, the company said. 

Responsive ads in the Search network allow advertisers to set between three and 15 unique ad headlines and between two and four ad descriptions in one ad. From there, Bing will select the most relevant headline and description combination for each given query and corresponding search user.