Remember the promise that the Internet would have ads just for your needs in real time? That just came a lot closer as Yahoo announced Yahoo Smart Ads, a product designed to bring “behavioral targeting” to online advertising. It works like this: the company advertising its product would supply Yahoo with the features that make up its ads, such as pictures and logos. The retailer would give Yahoo information from its inventory database – the closest store to the consumer that stocks the product, for instance. Yahoo would combine the data, and using information it’s gathered about users, create a product-specific ad and show it to those likely to buy. That means, for example, that if you’d been searching online for a new digital camera, Yahoo could show you an ad for a digital camera from a specific retailer close to where you live. This type of one-to-one marketing has long been the dream of Internet advertisers. “Ad agencies have been really struggling with how to scale the value proposition of the Internet,” said senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo, Todd Teresi. “We now can get scaleable one-to-one marketing.” For the moment Yahoo is testing the new technology with two unnamed major airlines, although it will be rolled out more widely this fall, and will be applied to ads bought on Right Media, the online ad exchange that Yahoo bought earlier this year. In time, Yahoo hopes to work with ad agencies in the design of online ads. That way, if some company chooses to buy a complete site, the company will be able to create specific ads for individual consumers.
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