• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 3, 2008

Turn Inc. today formally launches its automated ad network more than a year after the service debuted in beta.

The Turn Smart Network aims to stand apart from myriad competitors by combining contextual, audience, behavioral, and other targeting methods to serve the optimal ad placement. Co-founded by former AltaVista CEO Jim Barnett, the Turn network also lets advertisers buy inventory on a CPM, cost-per-click and cost-per-action basis.

"You no longer need to have these siloes or debates about which targeting approach works best," said Barnett, who believes the multitude of ad networks of different flavors only confuses advertisers. "It's just a real mess." Turn's all-in-one targeting system seeks to simplify the process by automatically selecting the most appropriate ad by weighing more than 60 variables.

So far, that approach has led more than 500 advertisers and 3,000 sites to join the Turn network. "We've made a decision to serve the short head rather than the long tail, and really focus on premium publishers and advertisers," said Barnett, ticking off advertisers including Geico and Capital One and sites run by big media brands such as CBS, Fox and Hachette Filipacchi.

Web publishers can use the system to choose from among 65 different criteria for advertising on their sites from advertisers to ad types. "We want to make sure we're delivering quality advertising and honoring all the restrictions and controls," Barnett said.

By year's end, the network aims to include the Internet's top 1,000 advertisers and more than 10,000 domains, Barnett said. This month, he estimates it will be serving about 1 billion impressions monthly.

Health-related site RealAge.com was among early publishers to join the Turn network. Ron Grinblat, RealAge's marketing director, said at the time Turn was one of the only networks offering CPA-based pricing. Its main goal is to get people to opt-in to take the Real Age test. On that basis, he said the site has "seen volume grow month over month" through the network.

Through Turn's self-service ad management system, advertisers first bid an amount per impression or type of action, whether a click or a sales lead. Then they upload display ad creative or text ad copy, and Turn analyzes the campaign elements and those of similar campaigns.

When the system gets an ad request, it searches its database for the best ad to serve to that user based on factors including site analysis, past performance, content category, user information and type of action, among others. Those variables are weighed against advertiser criteria to come up with the appropriate placement.

Advertisers can exclude publisher sites, but don't know on which sites their ads will appear.

As an example of how Turn works, Barnett said that someone looking at the washingtonpost.com home page might be served a travel-related ad because they had visited a travel site in the last 24 hours. In that case, behavioral targeting was deemed the best method for serving an ad.

But someone else reading a Post article on 401k plans might see a Capital One ad because they system more heavily weighted contextual placement in that instance. Someone else again looking at the obituary page might be served a diet ad based on audience data for that section, since contextual information wouldn't apply. "We have a combined targeting approach and we do it automatically," Barnett said.

Among the biggest changes Turn made during the beta period was to add CPM-based pricing to the mix based on feedback from advertisers. Despite the trend toward CPA-based ad-buying, "there's a lot of advertisers who still prefer to do business on a CPM basis," Barnett said.