I've noted before that the real excitement in online advertising is about platforms (reminder: the GOOG is an advertising platform). 

Back in 2008 (yeah, I was there before they were cool, etc.) I noted that contextual display wonks Dapper were on to a thing and would be acquired soon. Well it only took two years. Yahoo has picked them up. 

Eran Sher, who founded Dapper with the mission statement "to put the right content, at the right time, in front of the right user", has a great blog post outlining the thinking behind Dapper and the acquisition. Dapper video below summarises.

Well-known fact: Google makes (most of) its billions by providing relevant advertising. Google has a peerless search product, and places contextual search ads on its own sites and those of affiliate publishers, earning megabucks. This much we know.

Yesterday, Dapper was a cool mashup service. It took different feeds in from websites and spat out cool mashups for wunderkinder to embed. It's smart and useful (we used Dapper in ICAN with Yahoo Pipes, to create a crude proof-of-concept for a recent project for Oracle).

But today all of that just looks like sandboxing. A prototype for something much bigger: Dapper MashupAds.

Simply put: this creates the same relevance for display as search advertising. The videos below hint at the potential shift. If this product develops as it should, ads simply become just good, useful content. Dapper is going to be devoured soon.

(I note that the above has more than a nod to the now famous Web 2.0 'Machine is Us/ing Us' video. It also gives a hat tip to the insufferable Ogilvy, but anything with a soundtrack that reminds me of Alex Kidd in Miracle World is ok).

Update: Can't embed using YouTube or Vimeo. Posterous, WTF.