Its About Time: SmartAds from Yahoo!

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Online Customized Ads Move a Step Closer

By LOUISE STORY

Yahoo will announce new tools for online advertising today that could pull the company ahead in the race for what is called “behavioral targeting,” that is, the ability to better tailor online advertisements to the people most likely to buy.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

The Internet has long promised this kind of one-to-one marketing, but it has often been difficult for advertisers to customize display advertisements with a broad reach.

“Ad agencies have been really struggling with how to scale the value proposition of the Internet,” said Todd Teresi, senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo. “We now can get scaleable one-to-one marketing.”

The announcement of SmartAds also comes while Yahoo is recovering from an extensive reshuffling in the executive offices, including the departure of its chief executive, Terry S. Semel, and Wenda Harris Millard, the company’s longtime chief sales officer. Yahoo has struggled to catch up with Google in search advertising and has disappointed investors with its ad sales the past few quarters.

SmartAds is one attempt to catch up. Although the technology is complex, the goal of SmartAds is simple: show the right advertisement to the right person at just the moment that he is about to pull out his wallet to make a purchase.

“This fills a need that some advertisers have needed for a while — applying personalization to display ads, so they work like search and listing ads,” Mr. Kenny said. “Yahoo has a real advantage in SmartAds because of the data from their big and engaged audience, the combination of deep display and improving search capabilities, and the new changes to work with us at the technology level instead of just selling inventory.”