Dapper Mashes Things Up With Collaborative Ads

By James Mowery | Published Nov 12, 2008

All we've been hearing lately is how bad the economy is, how bad the advertising industry is, how much publishers are going to suffer. However, amid uncertain times, Dapper hopes to break through the pack with Dapper MashupAds, which takes a few pages from Google AdSense and a few pages of its own. It results in a fresh product that might stir up some needed innovation for display and contextual advertising.

Dapper MashupAds can be used by publishers and advertisers to place improved advertisements that take into account the publisher's and advertiser's site contents — certainly, a first in the advertising industry. This results in dynamic advertisements that are, potentially, much more useful to the audience.

A typical example of how Dapper MashupAds could benefit the audience is by placing a banner advertisement on a travel site. The publisher could have information about trips to Miami, while the advertiser could feed information about airfare, car rental or hotel pricing for Miami.

It all results in much more personal and useful advertisements that is highly likely to be more effective. Furthermore, advertisers are likely to pay more for this type of advertising than for typical AdSense units.

Dapper MashupAds will be available in both free and paid versions. The pay version will have additional features and controls for users and/or publishers.

The paid version might tie in with new features being planned for the future:

Tracking users' interactions with advertisements
Tuning inventory offered (if multiple selections possible)
Retrieving information from social graphs (if offered on social networks)

Interestingly, it appears that Dapper is helping to create the first ads that are collaborative in nature, utilizing content from both publisher and advertiser. While we are not sure that is how Dapper would describe them — it, certainly, sounds like a great description and a great idea.

The only question is whether or not Dapper will be able to execute on the idea? Then again, we might be asking how long before Google or Microsoft tries to acquire Dapper?

The advertising industry is going through really tough times, and advertisers are reluctant to buy inventory, but any system that can offer better targeting and effectiveness is surely an invaluable asset to publishers and advertisers. Dapper might just be the spark of innovation that the industry needs to get things moving again.