Mark Boulton:

The template > slot > ad mental model is engrained both in advertisers, planners and web sites. Providing space for ads needs to be broadened into multiple spaces for one ad concept. This requires closer collaboration between advertisers and web sites, designers and marketeers and sales teams.

This is exactly the issue I’ve faced in my redesign work for STV. My solution, and one that seems to been accepted, has been to:

• Develop a custom grid for STV based on the size of MMU units
• Design a series of page regions to accommodate a fixed number of same-size ad slots to help with adaptive layouts
• Use min-width on ad containers
• Serve leaderboards above the 768 breakpoint only

With STV’s permission, I’d love to publish some of our solutions.