Online Ad Company Turn Launches In Japan

Turn, which offers advertising tools in areas like real-time bidding and analytics, is announcing today that it has opened its first office in Japan.

This is part of a larger move into the Asia-Pacific region, said CEO Bill Demas. The company expanded in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia in the past year, and it also has a data center based in Hong Kong.

“We know we need to be in population centers. There are certainly users [in Japan] who are immersed in the Internet, and it has an active and thriving advertising community,” Demas said. “The inbound interest in Turn relative to other markets is just about as high as I’ve seen anywhere.”

To lead the company’s efforts in Japan, Turn has hired Akito Sato to be its country manager. Sato was previously strategic business development manager at Google Japan, where he launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, DoubleClick Search, and DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Sato will be in charge of building out a larger Japanese team. He said that when it comes to real-time bidding, Japan is a big market “dominated by local and domestic players,” so having a local team will give Turn an advantage over other global companies trying to enter the country. In addition, he said Turn will be “doing an extensive amount of localization,” both from a language and feature perspective, for the Japanese market.

Sato has been on the job for about six weeks, but the office itself only opened this week, Turn says.