Yahoo! has announced a new service called SmartAds which promises a more targeted approach to serving up advertisements on the web. As this news.com article explains, rather than offering up a generic advertisement the service will be able to provide ads that are relevant to the surfers gender, location and online activities. Ads for your local Toyota dealer would appear rather than the more generic manufactures ad, for instance. Up to the minute pricing can appear in the ad, combining Yahoo's demographic, geographic and behavioral targeting capabilities the advertising will be customized to each individual surfer. I'll reserve comment until I see how well it works but I like the localization aspect of the approach, living in a small town I'm not so sure they'll find advertisers who are really relevant to my location but we'll see.
