Yahoo to acquire ad company Dapper
As rival Google attempts to step up its game in display advertising, Yahoo has made another small acquisition to build up its ad technology. A price was not disclosed.
Yahoo has definitively agreed to acquire a company called Dapper to further hone its display advertising technology, the two companies announced today. A price was not disclosed, but it quite likely wasn't in the league of Yahoo's nearly $100 million purchase of Associated Content earlier this year.
"By combining Dapper's dynamic creative and real-time bidding technology platform with the largest and most successful leader in display advertising today, we expect to be able to bring advertisers and agencies greater efficiency and performance at a tremendous scale," explained a post on Dapper's Web site from the company's three founders. "The era of untargeted, irrelevant ads seems closer to its end than ever before."
Dapper was already a Yahoo partner on its "SmartAds" product, a customizable ad targeting tool that the company launched three years ago. SmartAds serves up more customized versions of ads based on an individual Web browser's age, gender, location, and other basic data--for example, an automotive ad that displays the car in question driving down San Francisco streets for a Bay Area-based Web user versus Boston streets for a New Englander.
These customized display ads are something that Yahoo ad rival Google has been touting in recent presentations like its "sexy" display advertising keynote address at an Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in New York last month.