ShopLocal & Pointroll Are Now Yahoo! Smart Ads Certified Rich Media Partners

The demographic and behavioral targeting (BT) enhanced PaperBoy ads that run under the Yahoo! white labeled product name of “Smart Ads” are finally certified.  This means that there has been a detailed inspection of all the ad metrics, ad performance, ad serving, etc by the Yahoo! Smart Ads team and that Pointroll passed with flying colors.  Nice work everyone at Pointroll and ShopLocal in passing this important external validation step.

Here is one interesting tidbit that helps validate why there is a need for dynamic generated and machine optimized rich media ads.

So if there are 300 weekly ad items live at any given point in time, and you needed to pick four specific products to include in a ad, there would be 300 + 299 + 298 + 297 possibilities (which is 1,195 options as each of the four outputs are calculated independently). This is why it is only possible to do this type of optimization via machine optimization and learning.

Here is a nice flashy demo that Yahoo! put together that overviews the SmartAds program

Hooray! ShopLocal and Pointroll are now official partners

The press pickup has been amazing with over 200+ sites running the story, so thank you to all.  Here are some soundbites from a few more notable sources:

• ADOTAS: “As a member of Yahoo’s Smart Ads program, PointRoll will leverage Yahoo’s reach and targeting capabilities to provide even more customized, relevant, and scalable rich media campaigns. PointRoll will also leverage its ShopLocal retail advertising program in order to offer enhanced Smart Ads for retail advertisers.”
• ClickZ: “Rich media firm PointRoll will tap Yahoo’s ad-targeting technology to deliver those ads to the right audiences, according to PointRoll CEO Jason Tafler. PointRoll’s ShopLocal retail ads will also be part of the Smart Ads program.” – ClickZ
• WebProNews: “Smart Ads can be used in any vertical industry, but Yahoo says it has seen success within the retail industry, where many advertisers are looking for new ways to reach consumers. Testing Smart Ads with ShopLocal retail ad content has shown improved campaign performance for retail advertisers such as CVS and Kohl’s. These advertisers saw gains in click performance, conversion and overall return on investment.” -

And finally, here is a link to the official release and some generic info on the Yahoo! Smart Ad program overall.