Yahoo! gets Smart

Emily Riley | July 02, 2007, 07:51 PM

Yahoo! announced today that they are rolling out Smart Ads, a new display offering that “automatically converts marketers’ creative campaign elements and targeted offerings into highly-customized and relevant display ads.” In their briefing, they told me that Smart Ads will allow advertisers to dynamically serve custom creatives much more easily across such targets as geo, demo, and most importantly behavioral. They only offer it to travel advertisers today, but plan to roll it out to other behavioral-type verticals like auto soon. The idea is a step towards personalization, especially because they can take search behavior and use it to serve pinpoint targeted ads in Yahoo! Mail, for example. I asked if it would be available through Right Media, and they said eventually, but only via the Yahoo relationship.
They claim a 2 to 3x increase in conversion, assuming the advertiser is savvy with which assets they provide Yahoo! which will make planning agencies happy. It also takes some of the sting out of the creative process by taking the separate elements and forming the banners on the fly. However, Smart Ads are only as good as the individual elements supplied to it, so the creative agency needs to think about the slicing and dicing up front. Additionally, it is not a creative testing engine, so “optimization” only happens through manual adjustment.