Yahoo launches ad-optimization service for display advertising
May 22, 2009
Smart tomes on smartphones
Yahoo has launched Smart Ads for display advertising to help brands significantly improve mobile and online campaign performance.
The service works by marrying Yahoo's massive reach and targeting capabilities with third-party advertising technology providers Teracent and Tumri. Smart Ad campaigns use ad-optimization technology to create a variety of creative executions through a combination of offers, colors, images and messaging in real time.
"Smart Ads are a completely new thing," said David Katz, vice president of mobile advertising and publisher services at Yahoo, Sunnyvale, CA. "They are dynamically created ads and that means you can take elements like text, background and graphics, and assemble them on the fly when the ad is served.
"That's cool because you can take a whole bunch of components of an ad and enter the targeting parameters and use them to build exactly the right ad, served at exactly the right time to the right user," he said.
Yahoo's new Smart Ads program will help marketers develop Smart Ad campaigns quickly and execute them across PCs and mobile phones in North America.
Yahoo will consider expanding the program to international markets in the future.
Testing of this initiative has already helped advertisers significantly improve campaign performance based on a variety of metrics, including click performance, conversion and overall return on investment.
For example, Yahoo and Tumri worked with Hewlett-Packard to create a Smart Ad campaign that generated more than 20,000 unique creative experiences, reaching more than 140 million U.S. users.
This campaign documented a return on ad spend that was more than 20 times higher than HP's traditional display campaigns.
HP has developed separate Smart Ad campaigns with Yahoo and Teracent, also producing higher results than traditional campaigns.
Yahoo is offering the Smart Ads technology to mobile advertisers through its partnership with Teracent.
As with the PC offering, advertisers will be able to customize creative to individual users in real time.
Smart Ads on mobile phones will be especially valuable to marketers, offering additional factors such as location, time of day, and even specialty attributes like local weather, to tailor messages to users on the go.
For example if an auto company buys a Smart Ad it can take a list of local dealers and models and combine it with parameters and the types of users being targeted for each car model.
The automaker could get a Smart Ad for Northern Californian families that says that the Ford Fusion Hybrid is the best car for them.
The new program will also allow Yahoo to expand its current Smart Ad offering to advertisers across all categories.
Yahoo is also testing the mobile Smart Ads via in-house advertising.
"You could accomplish the same objective by doing thousands of different creatives and booking a lot of different campaigns," Mr. Katz said. "Smart Ads makes it dynamic.
"The core challenge we are trying to address is helping brands reach the right consumer at the right time with the correct message," he said. "Targeting of ads is a clumsy process and [Smart Ads] allows brands to customize their marketing messages, their conversion process and anything about the ad creative."