The most important ad for a company or brand is its Website. So why not use that Website to generate ads? Dapper, a startup that can create a feed from any Website, is applying its technology to generate contextual, display ads from the constantly changing content on an advertiser’s own site.
The new service is called MashupAds. It is currently in private beta. The first 150 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will get an invite (mention TechCrunch in the comments)>
Everyone from Google to Yahoo is working on contextual display ads in an attempt to make display ads as relevant as contextual text ads. Like those efforts, MashupAds takes its cues from the content on the page where the ad is being served. So if you are researching what to do in Chicago on Fodor’s, you will get display ads for hotel rooms in Chicago. Where Dapper takes a step further is that the creative content in those ads are pulled directly from the relevant portion of the advertiser’s Website.
For instance, for a Marriott ad, you might see the Marriott hotels in Chicago along with room availability and prices. Click on Berlin, and you see the ads for hotel rooms in Berlin. When Marriott changes something on its Website, the changes are reflected in the ads. The Website is the ad (even on other sites).
Dapper has been testing MashupAds and claims a 3X to 5X improvement in click-through rates over other display ads. They can also take the form of a mini-store within the ad so people can buy those Docker pants without going to the Gap’s site. The ads can plug into most major ad networks. A month ago, the Yahoo product manager behind Search Monkey, Amit Kumar, left Yahoo to head up product management at Dapper. The videos below show how Mashup Ads work. (Update: Vimeo pulled the videos because it does not allow commercial use, so the company is putting them up on YouTube):
MashupAds: A contextual, interactive display ad ready to traffic in < 10 min from Paul Knegten on Vimeo.
Sounds like it has potential and can compete against the big guns!
seems like a lot of work to get ad’s up and running.
You mean to tell me somebody other than google came up with this first. Nice…
Looks pretty neat. I have requested for an account…Lets see
Wow, great product. But it really only works well for product related advertisements.
I like!
wicked cool
>So why not use that Website to generate ads?
We do this via Adwords for more than a year with very good CTR/CPC results.
1. Read content from our database (same db that is used by the website)
2. Run a daily batch job to upload content to our Adwords account via the iMacros tool (Simple Perl scripts do not work well with Adwords).
3. Done
The result are “fresh” Adwords and Adsense ads every day.
Self updating ads are a neat idea. But i’m not sure if this is a feature or a gimmick. Is the 3-5x CTR due to the improved and updated ads or is it from making advertisers match ads on publisher sites? Founded 2005 + 3million in funding and they picked NOW to release beta. There is either something wrong with the idea or the company.
I have to disagree with your comment. The company has been providing other services for a few years, but this is their new product.
Seems like a winner to me.
I also disagree… Their business model is based on the mashup space and not uniquely or exclusively on the contextual ad business.
They appear to be leveraging their mashup experience and applying it to the online advertising area; sounds like a nice play to me.
True, this is not their first service. But this service is supposed to be their bread and butter and it took 3 years to develop.
now how is this different than iPromote, which has been running ads on digg for over a month now?
Hey guys, this is nothing new. Adtuition has been doing this for quite some time now.
Dapper is wicked cool tech – I know some of the people behind this company and they are very sharp and just get the web. I’ve also used their older mashup service for generating data feeds from 1.0 web sites (e.g. sites without APIs or RSS/ATOM feeds) and it works great. The ads ideas has promise as well. Congrats to the Dapper team on this release! And no, I’m not affiliated with the company in any way.
Sounds like a very interesting product. You can see they have put a lot of work into this.
Steven Finch
http://crenk.com
http://adphilia.com
Interesting technology (even if it does just seem like a $3m screen-scraper…), but the hotel ad does not seem like a good example.
As someone with a company in the travel industry we are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized and to provide a superior product. It seems like reducing the product to a thumbnail and a bottom-line price is only useful to bargain motels and huge chains trying to fill extra capacity.
The technology Dapper has created, with their “screen-scraping” “create-a-feed-out-of-any-content” technology is far more significant than anyone gives them credit for. Essentially, they’re providing APIs for any site, regardless if that site wants or has one. In the absolute worst case, they allow existing feeds to be converted into more useful data (read: JSON+callback). This is genuine game-changing stuff. It should be every web developer/entrepreneur’s dream… finally all that content of other websites is unlocked! I feel lucky to be using their service (which is free, for now) to my advantage while not a lot of people know about it.
With regards to these MashUpAds, to me it’s only an example of one of many users of their technology. All they’ve done is said “well, using Dapps to power ads is a good idea” and showcased how it could be done. The only new technology presented here is that they create a template .swf file that automatically includes a dynamic XML document (any decent developer should know how to load an XML document anyway, ffs).
Let me try to explain the impact of this technology. Google right now indexes webpage, and extracts what “keywords” are associated with that webpage. This is BABY STUFF compared to the power of a Dapp. With a Dapp you can extract, systematically, different sections of the website, and use *any* of this data to generate structures far more complex and relevant than just a list of “keywords.” In fact, the dumbest use of this data “find the most commonly occuring word” is not too far off from adwords. In the best case, you get extremely intelligent results, catered to any site. Instead of simply “keywords,” you get “place user wants to visit,” “website getting reviewed on techcrunch,” “search string,” “number of results found in search,” “movie user is looking up on IMDB,” “actors in this movie,” etc… And these are just simple examples. Imagine an ad that using this type of information efficiently.
A user is viewing an IMDB movie entry. You sell DVDs, and want to advertise on IMDB. You make a Dapp to cross reference the movie they are looking up with your inventory to see if you have it on sale. Nothing? Ok, check out the leading actors of the movie, use a Dapp to find other movies they’ve been in, and see if you have any of those on sale. Still nothing? Ok, do something which would be pretty cool, and pull the date the movie was made and show an ad that says “buy the best movies of .” All this could be done without having either you or IMDB create an API… eg: you could make a Dapp that pulls your movies that are on sale.
Imagine the CTR on that type of ad… you’d be well off even paying double for the adspace on IMDB.