One of the most often-cited benefits of search advertising vs. display advertising is its contextual nature. When people do a search, you know quite literally what they’re looking for and, thus, displaying relevant advertising becomes much easier.

The Wall Street Journal and others are looking at Yahoo!’s new SmartAds technology to determine whether or not it has the potential to bring display advertising closer to search advertising’s flexibility standards:

The ads, which the Internet giant began offering to travel-industry advertisers a month ago, change colors, images and messages in response to what Yahoo knows about the Web surfer viewing them. A woman in New York who researched plane tickets to Miami on Yahoo Travel could be shown two days later an airline ad in a feminine hue including a fare quote for flights there. Source: The Wall Street Journal

Advertisers give Yahoo! the pieces of the ad: text, graphics, and inventory/price feeds. SmartAds then dynamically put the pieces of the puzzle together to create a display ad customized to what Yahoo! knows about the person viewing the page, historical behavior, etc.

So here’s what I want to know:

If Yahoo! has access to images, text, and databases of inventory/prices, why wouldn’t they just aggregate that information into their search results and other properties? Why wait two days (or any amount of time in the future) to show that information to the user? I know if I was searching for a flight to Miami on Monday there’s a good chance I’d have already found and booked one by Wednesday.

Wouldn’t a better solution be to display a current list of inventories and prices for the advertisers that Yahoo! has access to information on? They could still go ahead with the SmartAds approach and tailor search ads to historical behavior for future visits. But it would be more beneficial to the consumer to see that information presented in a timely, up-front manner.

What do you think?