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Yahoo’s new “SmartAds” launched

By Andrew Redfern @ 14th October 2007 8:17 pm

Yahoo! today announced the launch of Yahoo! SmartAds, a new, innovative advertising platform that allows marketers to deliver tailored display ads to highly targeted audiences.

SmartAds combines Yahoo!’s rich media capabilities with new ad serving technology that automatically converts marketers’ creative campaign elements and targeted offerings into highly-customized and relevant display ads.

“Yahoo!’s SmartAds gives marketers what they want from online advertising: the ability to deliver customized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand,” said Todd Teresi, Yahoo!’s senior vice president of display marketplaces.

“By enabling marketers to reach consumers on a more tailored basis and helping creative agencies support those customized campaigns, we can provide an even more engaging, relevant online experience to the more than 500 million users of Yahoo! branded products and services.”

Yahoo! SmartAds is powered by behavioral, demographic and geographic targeting capabilities and aim to connect users with what they are looking for based on their distinctive, expressed interests.

For example, if a user is browsing for hybrid cars in Yahoo! Autos and has selected San Francisco as their default location in Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo!’s SmartAds platform can assemble and deliver a display ad in real time that showcases a hybrid vehicle from a major auto brand, as well as local dealer information and current lease rates.

This provides a relevant experience to the user and allows the marketer to reach a user who is likely to become a customer.

In addition, Yahoo!’s patent-pending SmartAds platform allows advertisers and agencies to design a single set of individual creative components, provide Yahoo! with that artwork and a feed to their entire database of offers, then allow Yahoo!’s SmartAds technology to automatically generate the hundreds – if not thousands – of unique ad combinations based on those components.

This helps advertisers and agencies scale to take full advantage of all of Yahoo!’s audience targeting capabilities while maintaining control over how their brand is presented.

“Yahoo!’s SmartAds is the breakthrough marriage of brand and direct marketing that advertisers have been waiting for,” said David Kenny, Chairman, Digitas and Publicis Groupe Digital.

“By combining its huge audience, dynamic ad creation capabilities and deep knowledge of user interests, Yahoo! has developed a true innovation that will benefit agencies and its clients, especially companies with a large number of offers to present to many audience segments.”

Yahoo! is taking a phased approach to the SmartAds platform, making it available first on its owned and operated properties to travel industry advertisers in the U.S. The company has plans to expand it to additional vertical industries over the coming months and, in the future, deliver Smart Ads on its broader network of sites.

In testing conducted on Yahoo! FareChase, SmartAds generally resulted in click through rates of two to three times higher than static, non-customized display ads using the same targeting and placement.

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