Yahoo SmartAds - a new era of targeted advertising

Contextual advertising has been around for quite a long time. Now Yahoo has launched a new advertising system SmartAds , which should improve the quality of contextual advertising. This ad is designed for customers who often buy products and trust advertising.

The patented SmartAds technology will use for its purposes age, gender, geographic location and recent user search queries. According to this data, the system will generate targeted ads in real time. For clarification, you can give the following example. Instead of showing a Toyota Prius ad for a woman from San Francisco who is looking for this model in a search engine, a local dealer ad will be displayed with prices for the entire model range, and the background that is focused on the woman’s age will be changed.

But this type of advertising raises some questions. First, Yahoo SmartAds receives information about consumers from merchants who have made previous purchases - it seems to me that this is not entirely legitimate and violates the “consumer rights to privacy”. Secondly, such an advertisement will resemble a picture of the cyberpunk future, where billboards appeal to you by name and think for you about what to buy. I would not like such a thing.