New Yahoo tool designed to target display ads

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has introduced an automated advertising tool that it says will make targeted display advertising easier and more affordable, but the new tool will not initially be offered for advertising on the sites of Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium, a network of 814 newspaper publishers with online agreements with Yahoo.

The new tool, called My Display Ads, lets companies go beyond basic text advertising and instead use more advanced display ads on ready-made templates to reach target audiences. In a similar way to how automated text-based ads can target viewers by demographics, locations or preferences, the new automated display ads will be easily adaptable for different viewers, with advertisement information being adjusted accordingly.

My Display Ads was launched June 23.

Yahoo’s targets for My Display Ads tool are small- or medium-sized retailers who want to reach local audiences, whom newspapers have traditionally depended on for advertising revenue.

My Display Ads won’t immediately be offered for advertising on the sites of Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members, who tap into Yahoo’s ability to garner online advertising revenue through their newspaper partnership with Yahoo. Instead, Yahoo wants to test the ads, including their pricing, templates and searching ability, on the Yahoo site first before expanding the service.

My Display Ads was launched by Yahoo in partnership with AdReady, based in Seattle. My Display Ads is similar to tools already used by AdReady, which works with specific newspaper sites such as The New York Times in gearing ads toward a limited audience.

Google also plans to launch similar advertising in October that will make display ads with pricing and product images in them, rather than just text, for companies that pay for sponsored search results on Google.


The item above was written from a published report by Jen Slothower, a graduate student at the Northeastern University School of Journalism and a news staff coordinator for the Bulletin.

 

© Copyright 1998-2009 New England Newspaper and Press Association. All rights reserved.
=