About Turn

Turn—the world's first Smart Market for online advertising

Turn is transforming the huge, yet highly inefficient display advertising industry through advanced technology that optimizes performance, provides greater control and insight, and—bottom line—yields greater profits for advertisers and publishers alike.

Turn addresses the challenges and inefficiencies of earlier generations of simple CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per impression) advertising by providing a smart market that:

  • Blends and automates multiple targeting approaches to maximize performance
  • Goes beyond the click in measuring consumer response to online ads
  • Gives unprecedented control to advertisers and publishers in an auction market
  • Shares market data to provide insight that leads to greater effectiveness

To date, technology has made online advertising faster, but it hasn't made it smarter. This is where Turn comes in. The combination of auction performance pricing with automatic, blended targeting is not only the next logical evolution for display advertising, but also the only way to achieve a true breakthrough in advertising performance.

Leading performance-driven advertisers such as CapitalOne, T-Mobile, and Teleflora use the Turn Smart Market to purchase inventory from name brand publishers, including MSN, CBS, Fox Interactive Media, and many others.

Founded in 2005 by Jim Barnett (former President of Overture Search and CEO of AltaVista) and John Ellis, Turn has received numerous awards including OnMedia 100 in 2007 and 2008, Momentum 2007 and Business 2.0 Next Net. Turn is based in Redwood City, CA and funded by Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures.

"Turn is proving to be a valuable partner for us. Since we started using Turn for our large technology client, their team has anticipated our needs and has been exceptionally responsive to our service requests. Even as Turn continues to scale, campaign performance and service have been rock solid. It's no surprise that Turn is doing well. I'm certain we'll be expanding our business with them."

- Allen Stern
Agency.com

"Turn ramped up MSN's Direct Response program and took extra measures to follow all of our creative and program policies. I've worked with many new networks, and none have run as smoothly."

- Brody O'Harran
Microsoft Network

"Turn has created a network it says is highly automated, using some 60 variables such as the content on a site, past performance of ads, and type of audience to more finely target ads to just the right people."

BusinessWeek Online