Yahoo has launched a behavioral ad targeting service called SmartAds, which is a designed to deliver customizable ads based on person’s age, gender, location, previous online activity and income level.

“Yahoo’s SmartAds gives marketers what they have long wanted from online advertising: the ability to deliver more personalized marketing messages to consumers, and still engage very large audiences with their brand,” Todd Teresi, Yahoo’s senior vice president of display marketplaces, told mediapost.

In describing how SmartAds will work, Teresi told the Times that:

“We’re doing real-time creative assembly that leverages what we know about our audience,” Mr. Teresi said. “You can buy the entire Wall Street Journal site, and when a female shows up, we will create a different ad or when someone from New York shows up, another one.”

Advertisers can design a group of rich media creative components, provide Yahoo a feed to their entire database of offers, then let the SmartAds technology automatically assemble ad combinations on-the-fly based on those components.

For example, a user based in Dallas who recently searched for information about “San Francisco hotels” might get a “smart” display ad from a particular airline featuring a customized offer of Dallas-San Francisco flight.

Yahoo claimed that ads served by SmartAds generally generated click-through rates, two to three times higher than static, non-personalized ads during the four month beta testing phase.

At present, only travel advertisers can enjoy the service of SmartAds but Yahoo is expected to roll out the system to other advertising categories later this year.

Behavioral targeting is said to be the new game in town when it comes to serving ads. With SmartAds, Yahoo has joined Google and Microsoft in the behavioral ad game.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 10:41 pm under Technology.

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