• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 12, 2010

San Francisco-based ad tech firm Dapper has named James Beriker as its new president and CEO.

Eran Shir, co-founder and former president and CEO, has been appointed chief technical officer at the performance-based marketing and ad platform, and will continue to be responsible for its product and engineering organization.

Beriker most recently served as president and CEO of search ad platform Efficient Frontier.

"Technology and algorithms brought efficiency, automation and increased performance to the search engine marketing channel," said Beriker. "I look forward to working with the Dapper team to develop products that fundamentally change the way that advertisers and agencies exploit the display channel."

With Dapper, advertisers can serve contextually sensitive display ads assembled from creative elements pulled from their own Web site, from product inventory data, or from any database of marketing offers without client or agency IT department involvement.

Online weather service Weather Underground, for one, relied on Dapper to generate dynamic ads with creative drawn from advertisers' product catalogs, Web sites and inventory systems.

A fashion retailer, for instance, can associate each item of its product catalog with a particular weather condition. Then, if a user is viewing their ad from a location where the weather is sunny, they will view "sunny" items such as T-shirts and beachwear -- while a user viewing the same ad from a location where it is raining will see "rainy" items such as jackets and galoshes.

Companies competing for a share of this dynamic ad-creation space, including Dapper and Tumri, have been more closely watched since rival Teracent was acquired by Google in late November. Teracent had previously raised $5 million in a funding round led by New Enterprise Associates in 2007.

"We think that this technology has great potential to improve display advertising on the Web," Neal Mohan, vice president of product management, and Joerg Heilig, engineering director at Google, wrote in a co-authored blog post regarding the acquisition of Teracent.

Prior to Efficient Frontier, Beriker held vice president, SVP and general manager positions at ValueClick. Previously, Beriker was the founder and CEO of Search123, a pay-per-click search engine marketing platforms that launched in late 2000, and was acquired by ValueClick in mid 2003.