Is Your Marketing Smart?

Ad technology evolves with Yahoo!'s SmartAds platform that allows marketers to specifically target Web users by their searches and set preferences.

By Victor Van Valen

Advertisers not only need to cater to and directly pinpoint a precise targeted audience to be successful; they need to customize their advertisements as well. In print mediums, you have an idea of who will see your ad. For example, you know Cosmopolitan magazine would be great to target women in their 20s and 30s and promote your new beauty product line. But when it comes to online venues, how can you target the right audience when millions are browsing?

Earlier this month, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! launched its SmartAds product, an innovative new advertising platform that allows marketers to deliver tailored ads to highly targeted audiences. SmartAds combines Yahoo!'s consumer insights and media capabilities with new ad serving technology that automatically converts campaign creative and targeted offerings into highly-customized, relevant ad displays.

Here's how it works: Let's say a user is browsing for hybrid cars in Yahoo! Autos and has selected New York as their default location in Yahoo! Weather. Yahoo!'s SmartAds platform will assemble and deliver an ad display in real time that showcases a hybrid vehicle from a major partnering auto brand, local dealer information and current lease rates. This provides a not only a relevant experience to the user but allows the partnering marketer to reach users who are more likely to become customers.

"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," says Todd Teresi, Yahoo!'s senior vice president of display marketplaces.

Yahoo!'s SmartAds technology automatically generates hundreds of unique ad combinations based on an advertisers creative set and offer database. Advertisers and agencies can thereby take full advantage of all of Yahoo!'s audience targeting capabilities and still maintain control over how their brand is presented.
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